"He had reached _Hoernitz_ when his stricken heart indulged itself in such outpourings. _Breiteberg_ arose at a short distance before him, with the few acres of land that still belonged to him lying waste for want of hands. Klaus threw a look of sullen discontent towards the land, and lo--he beheld there the figure of the Dwarf gliding along, and surrounded by countless sparkling lights. The lad stood still, and stared with astonishment at the apparition. Dissevered tones, as of a violin, floated in the disturbed air; and when the phantom lifted his fiddlestick, it seemed as if he sent a recognising nod towards his godchild. Klaus urged his beast forward, and at the same moment the Dwarf turned off at a cross-road, and with the speed of an arrow swept towards the neighbourhood of the Dwarf's well. "Klaus lay awake half the night dwelling upon this encounter, and when he fell to sleep, it was the subject of his dreams. 'The miller,' thought he, 'is right, after all! Godfather may be pacified yet, if he is properly and becomingly spoken to. How kindly he nodded to me! O, if I could get only half my fortune back!' Before Klaus was out of bed again, he resolved to have a trial, and, on the very next day, humbly to present himself to his godfather, if that great personage would deign him an interview. He had to go to the wood for sticks, and time and place were both favourable to a meeting with the spirit. "The road to the wood lay hard by the Dwarf's well. Klaus, arriving there, reined his horse up, and looked upon the spring with profoundly cogitative eyes. It was clear and still. Pearly bright the water ascended from the rent basaltic bottom, and rippled in a small thread-like rill through whispering rushes, across meadows and fields, until it reached the village. "'Now, this is the strangest well!' quoth Klaus, knocking out the ashes from his short stump of a pipe--'always humming and brumming when I take my way by it--and when I have passed it, it is just as though I had loaded on another hundred-weight. The poor thing regularly gasps, and plants her hoof as if she were pulling the church after her. Now, wo-ho, Whiteface!--wo-ho!" As Klaus spoke, the horse snorted, gasped, and stamped, without making any way. It was as though the devil had tied a hair about the spokes. After fearful struggling and long agony, the wood was at length reached. Klaus fell manfully to work. A sheaf of young trees were presently down before his axe. In the haste of the felling, he cut down some shrubbery, of no use in the manufacture of twirling-sticks, but trees and shrubs were heaped together on his cart; he stopped his pipe, and with provision at least for the next week, he gaily pushed towards home.