d passed, absence had increased his passion,
and his stubbornness had become greater under the weight of his
misfortune. Scarcely had he regained his freedom than he hastened to
the place of his birth to show himself to his Johanna. He appeared,
and all shunned him. Pressing necessity at last subdued his pride, and
overcame his sense of personal weakness,--he offered himself to the
opulent of the place, as willing to serve for daily hire. The farmer
shrugged his shoulders as he saw the weakly looking creature, and the
stout bony frame of a rival applicant was decisive against him in the
mind of the unfeeling patron. He made one effort more. One office was
still left--the very last post of an honest name. He applied for the
vacant place of herdsman of the town, but the peasant would not trust
his pigs to a scape-grace. Frustrated in every effort, rejected at
every place, he became a poacher for the third time, and for a third
time had the misfortune of falling into the hands of his watchful enemy.

The double relapse had increased the magnitude of the offence. The
judges looked into the book of laws, but not into the criminal's state
of mind. The decree against poachers required a solemn and exemplary
satisfaction; and Wolf was condemned to work for three years in the
fortification, with the mark of the gallows branded on his back.

This period also had elapsed, and he quitted the fortification, a very
different man from the man he was when he entered it. Here began a new
epoch in his life. Let us hear him speak himself, as he afterwards
confessed to his spiritual adviser, and before the court. "I entered
the fortification," he said, "as an erring man, and I left it--a
villain. I had still possessed something in the world which was dear
to me, and my pride had bowed down under shame. When I was brought to
the fortification, I was confined with three and twenty prisoners, two
of whom were murderers, while all the rest were notorious thieves and
vagabonds. They scoffed at me, when I spoke of God, and encouraged me
to utter all sorts of blasphemies against the Redeemer. Obscene songs
were sung in my presence, which, graceless fellow as I was, I could not
hear without disgust and horror; and what I saw done, was still more
revolting to my sense of decency. There was not a day in which some
career of shame was not repeated, in which some evil project was not
hatched. At first I shunned these people, and avo