anybody in the village, and spoke to nobody, she knew everybody, and all about the most secret things that went on in the place.  She could infer a great deal from the manner in which people met one another, and from words she overheard here and there.  And because this seemed very wonderful, she was feared and avoided.  She often used to describe herself, according to a local expression, as an “old-experienced” woman, and yet she was exceedingly active.  Every day, year in and year out, she ate a few juniper berries, and people said that was the reason why she was so vigorous and showed her sixty-six years so little.  The fact that the two sixes stood together caused her, according to an old country saying[3] (which, however, was not universally believed in) to be regarded as a witch.  It was said that she sometimes milked her black goat for hours at a time, and that this goat gave an astonishing quantity of milk, but that in milking this goat she was in reality drawing the milk out of the udders of the cows belonging to persons she hated, and that she had an especial grudge against Farmer Rodel’s cattle.  Moreover, Marianne’s successful poultry-keeping was also looked upon as witchcraft; for where did she get the food, and how was it that she always had chickens and eggs to sell?  It is true that in the summer she was often seen collecting cock-chafers, grasshoppers, and all kinds of worms, and on moonless nights she was seen gliding like a wil-o’-the-wisp among the graves in the churchyard, where she would be carrying a burning torch and collecting the large black worms that crept out, all the time muttering to herself.  It was even said that in the quiet winter nights she held wonderful conversations with her goat and with her fowls, which she housed in her room during the winter.  The entire wild army of tales of witchcraft and sorcery, banished by school education, came back and attached itself to Black Marianne.

Amrei sometimes felt afraid in the long, silent winter nights, when she sat spinning by Black Marianne, and nothing was heard but an occasional sleepy clucking from the fowls, or a dreamy bleat from the goat.  And it seemed truly magical how fast Marianne spun!  She even said once: 

“I think my John is helping me to spin.”  And then again she complained that this winter, for the first time, she had not thought wholly and solely of her John.  She took her self to task for it and called herself a bad mother, and complained that it seemed all the time as if the features of her John were slowly vanishing before her—­as if she were forgetting what he had done at such and such a time, how he had laughed, sung, and wept, and how he had climbed the tree and jumped into the ditch.

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