As soon as Margaret regained consciousness she tried to get rid of the strangers.  Her brother remained with her, and Frederick, who was threatened with severe punishment if he got out of bed, heard the fire crackling in the kitchen all night and a noise like stroking something back and forth, and brushing it.  There was little spoken and that quietly, but now and then sobs broke out that went through and through the child, young as he was.  Once he understood his uncle to say, “Margaret, don’t take it so badly; we will all have three masses read, and at Eastertide we’ll make together a pilgrimage to the Holy Virgin of Werl.”

When the body was carried away two days later, Margaret sat on the hearth and covered her face with her apron.  After a few minutes, when everything had become quiet, she mumbled, “Ten years, ten crosses!  But we carried them together, after all, and now I am alone!” Then louder, “Fritzy, come here!”

Frederick approached her timidly; his mother had become quite uncanny to him with her black ribbons and her haggard, troubled face.  “Fritzy,” she said, “will you now really be good and make me happy, or will you be naughty and lie, or drink and steal?”

“Mother, Huelsmeyer steals.”

“Huelsmeyer?  God forbid!  Must I spank you?  Who tells you such wicked things?”

“The other day he beat Aaron and took six groschen from him.”

“If he took money from Aaron, no doubt the accursed Jew had first cheated him out of it.  Huelsmeyer is a respectable householder, and the Jews are all rascals!”

“But, mother, Brandes also says that he steals wood and deer.”

“Child, Brandes is a forester.”

“Mother, do foresters tell lies?”

Margaret was silent a moment, and then said, “Listen, Fritz!  Our Lord makes the wood grow free and the wild game moves from one landowner’s property into another’s.  They can belong to no one.  But you do not understand that yet.  Now go into the shed and get me some fagots.”

Frederick had seen his father lying on the straw, where he was said to have looked blue and fearful; but the boy never spoke of it and seemed indisposed to think of it.  On the whole, the recollection of his father had left behind a feeling of tenderness mingled with horror, for nothing so engrosses one as love and devotion on the part of a person who seems hardened against everything else; and in Frederick’s case this sentiment grew with the years, through the experience of many slights on the part of others.  As a child he was very sensitive about having any one mention his deceased father in a tone not altogether flattering to him—­a cause for grief that the none too delicate neighbors did not spare him.  There is a tradition in those parts which denies rest in the grave to a person killed by accident.  Old Mergel had thus become the ghost of the forest of Brede; as a will o’ the wisp he led a drunken man into the pond by a hair; the shepherd boys, when