Christmas tree was lighted; and then he would either break with Toni or feel free to marry her. "The bride stared at Adam with amazement as he put on his grey cloak and his fur cap and seized his pointed stick. He looked both handsome and terrible." For he is one of the heroes Germans love, a giant who once held a bull by its horns while Martina escaped from it, who is called the _Gaul_, because for a wager he once carried the cart and the load a cart horse should have carried, and who on this wild winter night meets the wolf in the forest and kills it with his stick. So you see him striding through the snow-bound forest to the village where Martina lives, dragging the wolf after him, as strong as Siegfried, as credulous as a child, ready to believe that the voices of his father and his child both looking for him in the snow are witches' voices. But when he gets to the village he finds that his child, so long disowned and disregarded, is really lost, and is looking for him in the snow. The hatter who tramps from village to village hung with hats met him, and tried to turn him back. But the child said he had come out to find his father, and must go on. Then every man in the village assembles at the _Pfarrhaus_, and, led by the _Pfarrer's_ brother-in-law (an eventual husband for Heidenmüller's Toni), sets out to find Joseph in the snow. Before they start Adam vows before the whole community that whether the child is alive or dead nothing shall ever part him again from Martina, and when he has made this vow you see the whole company depart in various directions carrying torches, ladders, axes, and long ropes. Meanwhile the child, after some alarms and excursions, meets three angels (children masquerading), who take him with them to the mill where Toni has just lighted the Christmas tree. She rescues Joseph from _die wilde Röttmännin_, and that same night, her father dying of his carouse, she becomes a rich heiress and free of her wicked stepmother. Joseph's hostile grandfathers, after a fight in the snow, make friends, the obliging _Pfarrer_ marries Adam and Martina at midnight, and soon after the _wilde Röttmännin_ who will not be reconciled leaves this world. So everyone who deserves happiness gets it. But though you only half believe in the story you have been in the very heart of the Black Forest, the companion of its people, the observer of their most intimate talk and ways. You have heard the women gossip at the well, you have made friends with Leegart the seamstress, who believes that quite against her will she is gifted with supernatural powers. There is Häspele, too, who made Joseph his new boots, and would marry Martina if he could; and there is David, the father of Martina, who was hardly kept from murdering his daughter when she came home in disgrace, and whose grandson becomes the apple of his eye. The whole picture of these people is vivid and enchanting, touched with quaint