narrow passes, and slept calmly on.  Now and then an occasional shot, a faint scream, startled perhaps a young wife or an engaged girl; no one else paid any attention to it.  At the first gray light of dawn the procession returned just as silently—­every face bronzed, and here and there a bandaged head, which did not matter.  A few hours later the neighborhood would be alive with talk about the misfortune of one or more foresters, who were being carried out of the woods, beaten, blinded with snuff, and rendered unable to attend to their business for some time.

In this community Frederick Mergel was born, in a house which attested the pretensions of its builder by the proud addition of a chimney and somewhat less diminutive window panes, but at the same time bespoke the miserable circumstances of its owner by its present state of dilapidation.  What had once been a hedge around the yard and the garden had given way to a neglected fence; the roof was damaged; other people’s cattle grazed in the pastures; other people’s corn grew in the field adjoining the yard; and the garden contained, with the exception of a few woody rose bushes of a better time, more weeds than useful plants.  Strokes of misfortune had, it is true, brought on much of this, but disorder and mismanagement had played their part.  Frederick’s father, old Herman Mergel, was, in his bachelor days, a so-called orderly drinker—­that is, one who lay in the gutter on Sundays and holidays, but during the week was as well behaved as any one, and so he had had no difficulty in wooing and winning a right pretty and wealthy girl.  There was great merrymaking at the wedding.  Mergel did not get so very drunk, and the bride’s parents went home in the evening satisfied; but the next Sunday the young wife, screaming and bloody, was seen running through the village to her family, leaving behind all her good clothes and new household furniture.  Of course that meant great scandal and vexation for Mergel, who naturally needed consolation; by afternoon therefore there was not an unbroken pane of glass in his house and he was seen late at night still lying on his threshold, raising, from time to time, the neck of a broken bottle to his mouth and pitifully lacerating his face and hands.  The young wife remained with her parents, where she soon pined away and died.  Whether it was remorse or shame that tormented Mergel, no matter; he seemed to grow more and more in need of “spiritual” bolstering up, and soon began to be counted among the completely demoralized good-for-nothings.

The household went to pieces, hired girls caused disgrace and damage; so year after year passed.  Mergel was and remained a distressed and finally rather pitiable widower, until all of a sudden he again appeared as a bridegroom.  If the event itself was unexpected, the personality of the bride added still more to the general astonishment.  Margaret Semmler was a good, respectable person, in her forties, a village