They then returned to the common apartment.  The mistress of the house immediately offered her great chair to the priest, and continued urging it upon him till she saw him fairly in possession of it.  “You are old and exhausted,” said she, “and are, moreover, a man of God.”

Undine shoved under the stranger’s feet her little stool, on which at all other times she used to sit near to Huldbrand, and showed herself most gentle and amiable towards the old man.  Huldbrand whispered some raillery in her ear, but she replied, gravely: 

“He is a minister of that Being who created us all; and holy things are not to be treated with lightness.”

The knight and the fisherman now refreshed the priest with food and wine; and when he had somewhat recovered his strength and spirits, he began to relate how he had the day before set out from his cloister, which was situated far off beyond the great lake, in order to visit the bishop, and acquaint him with the distress into which the cloister and its tributary villages had fallen, owing to the extraordinary floods.  After a long and wearisome wandering, on account of the rise of the waters, he had been this day compelled toward evening to procure the aid of a couple of boatmen, and cross over an arm of the lake which had burst its usual boundary.

“But hardly,” continued he, “had our small ferry-boat touched the waves, when that furious tempest burst forth which is still raging over our heads.  It seemed as if the billows had been waiting our approach only to rush on us with a madness the more wild.  The oars were wrested from the grasp of my men in an instant; and shivered by the resistless force, they drove farther and farther out before us upon the waves.  Unable to direct our course, we yielded to the blind power of nature, and seemed to fly over the surges toward your distant shore, which we already saw looming through the mist and foam of the deep.  Then it was at last that our boat turned short from its course, and rocked with a motion that became more wild and dizzy:  I know not whether it was overset, or the violence of the motion threw me overboard.  In my agony and struggle at the thought of a near and terrible death, the waves bore me onward, till I was cast ashore here beneath the trees of your island.”

“Yes, an island!” cried the fisherman; “a short time ago it was only a point of land.  But now, since the forest stream and lake have become all but mad, it appears to be entirely changed.”

“I observed something of it,” replied the priest, “as I stole along the shore in the obscurity; and hearing nothing around me but a sort of wild uproar, I perceived at last that the noise came from a point exactly where a beaten footpath disappeared.  I now caught the light in your cottage, and ventured hither, where I cannot sufficiently thank my Heavenly Father that, after preserving me from the waters, He has also conducted me to such pious people as you are; and the more so, as it is difficult to say whether I shall ever behold any other persons in this world except you four.”