This mysterious catastrophe dismayed the entire village, and vain efforts were made to explain it. Prayers for Carroll’s soul were said in the same church where but a few days before he himself sang hymns of thanksgiving for his happiness. No one knew what kept Widow Stadt alive. At the end of nine months of solitary grief she brought into the world a son, and on the same day the village of Golyn was destroyed by the fall of the hanging cliff above it. The birth of this son did not dissipate his mother’s deep depression. Gill Stadt showed no signs of resemblance to Carroll. His fierce, angry infancy seemed to prophecy a still more ferocious manhood. Sometimes a little wild man--whom those mountaineers who saw him from a distance asserted to be the famous Hans of Iceland--entered the lonely hut of Carroll’s widow, and the passers-by would then hear a woman’s shrieks and what seemed the roar of a tiger. The man would carry off young Gill, and months would elapse; then he would restore him to his mother, more sombre and more terrible than before. Widow Stadt felt a mixture of horror and affection for the child. Sometimes she would clasp him in her maternal arms, as the only tie which still bound her to earth; again she would repulse him with terror, calling upon Carroll, her dear Carroll. No one in the world knew what agitated her soul. Gill reached his twenty-third year; he saw Guth Stersen, and loved her madly. Guth Stersen was rich, and he was poor; therefore he set off for Roeraas and turned miner, in order to make money. His mother never heard from him again. One night she sat at the wheel, by which she earned her daily bread; the lamp burned low as she worked and waited in her cabin, beneath those walls which had grown old like herself, in solitude and grief, the silent witnesses of her mysterious wedding-night. She thought anxiously of her son, whose presence, ardently desired as it was, would recall much sorrow, perhaps bring more in its train. The poor mother loved her son, ungrateful as he was. And how could she help loving him, she had suffered so much for him? She rose and took from an antique wardrobe a crucifix thickly coated with dust. For an instant she looked at it imploringly; then suddenly casting it from her in horror, she cried: “I pray! How can I pray? Your prayers can only be addressed to hell, poor woman! You belong to hell, and to hell alone.” She had relapsed into her mournful revery, when there was a knock at the door. This was a rare event with Widow Stadt. For many long years, in consequence of the strange incidents connected with her history, the whole village of Thoctree believed that she had dealings with evil spirits; no one therefore ever ventured near her hut,--strange superstitions of that age and ignorant region! She owed to her misfortunes the same reputation for witchcraft that the keeper of the Spladgest owed to his learning.