Here Simon suddenly clutched the boy’s arm.  “Frederick, do you know that tree?  That is the broad oak.”  Frederick started, and with his cold hands clung to his uncle.  “See,” Simon continued, “here Uncle Franz and Huelsmeyer found your father, when without confession and extreme unction he had gone to the Devil in his drunkenness.”

“Uncle, uncle!” gasped Frederick.

“What’s coming over you?  I should hope you are not afraid?  Devil of a boy, you’re pinching my arm!  Let go, let go!” He tried to shake the boy off.  “On the whole your father was a good soul; God won’t be too strict with him.  I loved him as well as my own brother.”  Frederick let go his uncle’s arm; both walked the rest of the way through the forest in silence, and soon the village of Brede lay before them with its mud houses and its few better brick houses, one of which belonged to Simon.

The next evening Margaret sat at the door with her flax for fully an hour, awaiting her boy.  It had been the first night she had passed without hearing her child’s breathing beside her, and still Frederick did not come.  She was vexed and anxious, and yet knew that there was no reason for being so.  The clock in the tower struck seven; the cattle returned home; still he was not there, and she had to get up to look after the cows.

When she reentered the dark kitchen, Frederick was standing on the hearth; he was bending forward and warming his hands over the coal fire.  The light played on his features and gave him an unpleasant look of leanness and nervous twitching.  Margaret stopped at the door; the child seemed to her so strangely changed.

“Frederick, how’s your uncle?” The boy muttered a few unintelligible words and leaned close against the chimney.

“Frederick, have you forgotten how to talk?  Boy, open your mouth!  Don’t you know I do not hear well with my right ear?” The child raised his voice and began to stammer so that Margaret failed to understand anything.

“What are you saying?  Greeting from Master Semmler?  Away again?  Where?  The cows are at home already.  You bad boy, I can’t understand you.  Wait, I’ll have to see if you have no tongue in your mouth!” She made a few angry steps forward.  The child looked up to her with the pitiful expression of a poor, half-grown dog that is learning to sit up on his hind legs.  In his fear he began to stamp his feet and rub his back against the chimney.

Margaret stood still; her glances became anxious.  The boy looked as though he had shrunk together.  His clothes were not the same either; no, that was not her child!  And. yet—­“Frederick, Frederick!” she cried.

A closet door in the bedroom slammed and the real Frederick came out, with a so-called clog-violin in one hand, that is, a wooden shoe strung with three or four resined strings, and in his other hand a bow, quite befitting the instrument.  Then he went right up to his sorry double, with an attitude of conscious dignity and independence on his part, which at that moment revealed distinctly the difference between the two boys who otherwise resembled each other so remarkably.