The son mounted his horse, and his mother looked after him.  But suddenly she called out again: 

“Stop—­I must tell you something else.  I have forgotten the most important of all.”

The son turned his horse around, and when he got back to his mother, he said, smiling: 

“But mother—­this is the last, eh?”

“Yes, and the best test of all.  Ask the girl about the poor people in her town, and then listen to what the poor people have to say about her.  A farmer’s daughter who has not taken some poor person by the hand to help her, cannot be a worthy girl—­remember that.  And now, God keep you, and ride forth bravely.”

As he rode off the mother spoke a prayer to speed him on his way, and then returned to the farm.

“I ought to have told him to inquire about Josenhans’s children, and to find out what has become of them,” said the mother to herself.  She felt strangely moved.  And who knows the secret ways through which the soul wanders, or what currents flow above our wonted course, or deep beneath it?  What made the mother think of these children, who seemed to have faded from her memory long ago?  Was her present pious mood like a remembrance of long-forgotten emotions?  And did it awaken the circumstances that had accompanied those emotions?  Who can understand the impalpable and invisible elements that wander and float back and forth from man to man, from memory to memory?

When the mother got back to the farm and found the father, the latter said: 

“No doubt you have given him many directions how to fish out the best one; but I, too, have been making some arrangements.  I have written to Crappy Zachy—­he is sure to lead him to the best houses.  He must bring a girl home who has plenty of good coin.”

“Plenty of coin doesn’t constitute goodness,” replied the mother.

“I know that!” cried the farmer, with a sneer.  “But why shouldn’t he bring home one who is good and has plenty of coin into the bargain?”

The mother sat silent for a time, but after awhile she said: 

“You’ve referred him to Crappy Zachy.  It was at Crappy Zachy’s that Josenhans’s boy was boarded out.”

Thus her pronouncing the name aloud showed that her former remembrances were dawning upon her; and now she became conscious what those remembrances were.  And her mind often reverted to them during the events that were soon to occur, and which we are about to relate.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the farmer.  “What’s the child to you?  Why don’t you say that I did the thing wisely?”

“Yes, yes, it was wisely done,” the wife acquiesced.  But the tardy praise did not satisfy the old man, and he went out grumbling.

A certain apprehension that things might go wrong with his boy after all, and that perhaps he had been in too great a hurry, made the farmer gruff, for the present, toward everybody about him.