the
smouldering wood, in order to mount freely into the blue sky. Little
clouds floated over the damp, grassy earth, rotting tree-trunks, piles
of wood and heaps of twigs that surrounded the kiln. A moss-grown but
stood at the edge of the forest, and before it sat Ulrich, talking with
the coal-burner. People called this man "Hangemarx," and in truth he
looked in his black rags, like one of those for whom it is a pity that
Nature should deck herself in her Spring garb. He had a broad, peasant
face, his mouth was awry, and his thick yellowish-red hair, which in
many places looked washed out or faded, hung so low over his narrow
forehead, that it wholly concealed it, and touched his bushy, snow-white
brows. The eyes under them needed to be taken on trust, they were so
well concealed, but when they peered through the narrow chink between
the rows of lashes, not even a mote escaped them. Ulrich was shaping an
arrow, and meantime asking the coal-burner numerous questions, and when
the latter prepared to answer, the boy laughed heartily, for before
Hangemarx could speak, he was obliged to straighten his crooked mouth by
three jerking motions, in which his nose and cheeks shared.

An important matter was being discussed between the two strangely
dissimilar companions.

After it grew dark, Ulrich was to come to the charcoal-burner again.
Marx knew where a fine buck couched, and was to drive it towards the
boy, that he might shoot it. The host of the Lamb down in the town
needed game, for his Gretel was to be married on Tuesday. True, Marx
could kill the animal himself, but Ulrich had learned to shoot too,
and if the place whence the game came should be noised abroad, the
charcoal-burner, without any scruples of conscience, could swear that he
did not shoot the buck, but found it with the arrow in its heart.

People called the charcoal-burner a poacher, and he owed his ill-name
of "Hangemarx" to the circumstance that once, though long ago, he had
adorned a gallows. Yet he was not a dishonest man, only he remembered
too faithfully the bold motto, which, when a boy, one peasant
wood-cutter or charcoal-burner whispered to another:

"Forest, stream and meadow are free."

His dead father had joined the Bundschuh,--[A peasants' league
which derived its name from the shoe, of peculiar shape, worn by its
members.]--adopted this motto, and clung fast to it and with it, to the
belief that every living thing in the forest belonged to