“I have no time for jesting.  Now, God keep you!”

“Wait a little.  I’ll go with you—­but you must not walk too fast.”  Amrei carefully helped the old man to his feet, and he remarked: 

“You are strong,”—­and in his teasing way he made himself more helpless and heavier than he actually was.  As they walked along, he asked: 

“To whom are you going at the farm?”

“To the farmer and his wife.”

“What do you want of them?”

“That I shall tell them.”

“Well, if you want anything of them, you had better turn back at once.  The mistress would give you something, but she has no authority to, and the farmer, he’s tight—­he’s got a board on his neck, and a stiff thumb into the bargain.”

“I don’t want anything given me—­I bring them something,” said Amrei.

On the way they met an older man going to the field with his scythe; and the old farmer walking with Amrei called out to him with a queer blink in his eyes: 

“Do you know if miserly Farmer Landfried is at home?”

“I think so, but I don’t know,” answered the man with the scythe, and he turned away into the field.

There was a peculiar twitching in his face.  And now, as he walked along, his shoulders seemed to Amrei to be shaking up and down; he was evidently laughing.  Amrei looked at her companion’s face and saw the roguery in it.  Suddenly she recognized in the withered features the face of the man to whom she had given a jug of water, years ago, on the Holderwasen.  Snapping her fingers softly, she said to herself: 

“Stop!  Now I know!” And then she added aloud:  “It’s wrong of you to speak in that way of the Farmer to a stranger like me, whom you don’t know, and who might be a relative of his.  And I’m sure it is not true what you say.  They do say, to be sure, that the Farmer is tight; but when you come right down to it, I dare say he has an honest heart, and simply doesn’t like to make an outcry about it when he does a good deed.  And a man who has such good children as his are said to be, must be a good man himself.  And perhaps he likes to make himself out bad before the world, simply because he doesn’t care what others think of him; and I don’t think the worse of him for that.”

“You have not left your tongue behind you.  Where do you come from?”

“Not from this neighborhood—­from the Black Forest.”

“What’s the name of the place?”

“Haldenbrunn.”

“Oh!  Have you come all the way from there on foot?”

“No, somebody let me ride with him.  He’s the son of the Farmer yonder—­a good, honest man.”

“Ah, at his age I should have let you ride with me too!”

They had now come to the farm, and the old man went with Amrei into the room and cried: 

“Mother, where are you?”

The wife came out of another room, and Amrei’s hands trembled; she would gladly have fallen upon her neck—­but she could not—­she dared not.