“If there were only an eye to watch over thee and a hand to help thee all the time, as there is now in thy sleep, and to take the heaviness out of thy heart without thy knowing it!  But nobody can do that—­none but He alone.  Oh, may He do unto my child in distant lands as I do unto this little one!”

Black Marianne was a shunned woman, that is to say, people were almost afraid of her, so harsh did she seem in her manner.  Some eighteen years before she had lost her husband, who had been shot in an attempt which he had made with some companions to rob the stage-coach.  Marianne was expecting a child to be born when the body of her husband, with its blackened face, was carried into the village; but she bore up bravely and washed the dead man’s face as if she hoped, by so doing, to wash away his black guilt.  Her three daughters died, and only the son, who was born soon afterward, lived to grow up.  He turned out to be a handsome lad, though he had a strange, dark color in his face; he was now traveling abroad as a journeyman mason.  For from the time of Brosi, and especially since that worthy man’s son, Severin, had worked his way up to such high honor with the mallet, many of the young men in the village had chosen to follow the mason’s calling.  The children used to talk of Severin as if he were a prince in a fairy tale.  And so Black Marianne’s only child had, in spite of her remonstrances, become a mason, and was now wandering around the country.  And she, who all her life long had never left the village, nor had ever desired to leave it, often declared that she seemed to herself like a hen that had hatched a duck’s egg; but she was almost always clucking to herself about it.

One would hardly believe it, but Black Marianne was one of the most cheerful persons in the village; she was never seen to be sorrowful, for she did not like to have people pity her; and that is why they did not take to her.  In the winter she was the most industrious spinner in the village, and in the summer, the busiest at gathering wood, a large part of which she was able to sell; and “my John”—­for that was her surviving child’s name—­“my John” was always the subject of her conversation.  She said that she had taken little Amrei to live with her, not from a desire to be kind, but in order that she might have some living being about her.  She liked to appear rough before people, and thus enjoyed, all the more, the proud consciousness of independence.

The exact opposite to her was Crappy Zachy, with whom Damie had found shelter.  This worthy represented himself to people as a kind-hearted fellow who would give away anything he had; but as a matter of fact he bullied and ill-used his entire household, and especially Damie, for whose keep he received but a small sum of money.  His real name was Zechariah, and he got his nickname from his once having brought home to his wife a couple of finely trussed pigeons to roast, but they were in fact a pair of plucked