*

BURNING LOVE (1902)

TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD, A.M.
Assistant Professor of German, Harvard University

There were fires in the village. It was always at night that they
broke out, now here, now there; and this had been going on for eight
weeks. The corn in the fields had just come to the full ear when on a
dark evening the first blaze was discovered. Since that time the
fearful guest had visited no less than ten cottages.

The damage had indeed been slight. One peasant had the reeds and thatch
of his low-hanging roof a little singed. In another house the side of
bacon left from last winter's pig and still hanging from the beam under
the roof had been made to sizzle a bit. At a third, the brushwood that
children had gathered and piled up along the wall had crackled and
snapped, until the wife, wakened by her infant's cries, thought some
one out there was stealing her kindling. At a fourth, the frightened
lowing of the cow revealed a smouldering in the hay-loft. At the
fifth, the flame did not even get started; for a downpour of rain had
beaten upon the attic and quenched whatever of fire was lurking in the
timbers. In every case the protection of all the saints had been plain
to see.

Nevertheless, a secret horror began to worry the minds of the
villagers.

"I warrant," said a wiseacre, contracting the brown leather of his brow
in suspicious wrinkles, "some scalawag is doing this!"

Yes, it could not be otherwise: there was somebody setting fires!
The children could not be the guilty ones--they were led by hand or
carried in the dosser out into the fields; or, if it happened that they
were left behind, their mother did not fail to hide the matches on the
topmost shelf beyond their reach. But had not Annie Marie, watching
alone by the cradle of her sick child one evening when all the others
were still working in the fields, seen a fellow in disguise peering in
at her window? And had not Brewer's Hubert, coming home late at night,
caught sight of a dark shadowy figure that slipped by him and escaped
in the hedgerow between the gardens?

There could no longer be any doubt: there was an incendiary. But where?
Who was the miscreant? Some man in the village? Impossible! In the
village each man knows the other far too well, learns too well from his
daily toil how hard it is to scrape together his little livelihood, for
him out of sheer wantonness to