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The great compassionate forest spread over the wilderness.  Concealing and protecting, it took to its heart everything which sought its help.  With its lofty trunks it kept watch by the lair of the fox and the bear, and in the twilight of the thick bushes it hid the egg-filled nests of little birds.

At the time when people still had slaves, many of them escaped to the woods and found shelter behind its green walls.  It became a great prison for them which they did not dare to leave.  The forest held its prisoners in strict discipline.  It forced the dull ones to use their wits and educated those ruined by slavery to order and honor.  Only to the industrious did it give the right to live.

The two who met on the heath were descendants of such prisoners of the forest.  They sometimes went down to the inhabited, cultivated valleys, for they no longer feared to be reduced to the slavery from which their forefathers had fled, but they were happiest in the dimness of the forest.  The hunter’s name was Toenne.  His real work was to cultivate the earth, but he also could do other things.  He collected herbs, boiled tar, dried punk, and often went hunting.  The dancer was called Jofrid.  Her father was a charcoal burner.  She tied brooms, picked juniper berries and brewed ale of the white-flowering myrtle.  They were both very poor.

They had never met before in the big wood, but now they thought that all its paths wound into a net, in which they ran forward and back and could not possibly escape one another.  They never knew how to choose a way where they did not meet.

Toenne had once had a great sorrow.  He had lived with his mother for a long while in a miserable, wattled but, but as soon as he was grown up he was seized with the idea to build her a warm cabin.  During all his leisure moments he went into the clearing, cut down trees and hewed them into squared pieces.  Then he hid the timber in dark crannies under moss and branches.  It was his intention that his mother should not know anything of all this work before he was ready to build the house.  But his mother died before he could show her what he had collected; before he had time to tell her what he had wished to do.  He, who had worked with the same zeal as David, King of Israel, when he gathered treasures for the temple of God, grieved most bitterly over it.  He lost all interest in the building.  For him the brushwood shelter was good enough.  Yet he was hardly better off in his home than an animal in its hole.

When he, who had always heretofore crept about alone, was now seized with the desire to seek Jofrid’s company, it certainly meant that he would like to have her for his sweetheart and his bride.  Jofrid also waited daily for him to speak to her father or to herself about the matter.  But Toenne could not.  This showed that he was of a race of slaves.  The thoughts that came into his head moved as slowly as the sun when he travels across the sky.  And it was more difficult for him to shape those thoughts to connected speech than for a smith to forge a bracelet out of rolling grains of sand.