"Gently, gently! I have not got him in my bundles. Below there, in the wood, I all at once met a boy; I asked him: 'What are you doing here alone, and night beginning to fall? where are you going to?' 'To meet my father, who is coming up this road; did you not see him?' 'What is your father like?' 'Big and strong.' 'I have not seen him--come home with me, child.' 'No, I am coming home with my father.' I took hold of the child, and tried to bring him with me by force, but he being wild and obstinate, gave me the slip, and darted off like a deer, and I heard him still calling, far into the wood, 'Father! father!'" "That was certainly Joseph; for God's sake let us go after him." "We will all go--all!" "Stop!" said Schilder-David, coming forward; "hatter, will you go with us?" "I cannot, for I am so weary, I can scarcely set one foot before the other; besides, it would be of no use, for it is more than an hour since I saw the child; I stopped for some time at the Meierhof; and who knows where the child may be now; I can tell you exactly where I met him--in the Otterswald Wood, close to the river, where the large spreading beech stands. It is the only very large tree there, and you all know it." "Very well," said Schilder-David, striving to be composed; "I shall take good care to break a branch off that tree, to make Joseph remember it." "No! no, you are not to beat him!" exclaimed Martina--she did not like to say, that this was the very same beech tree, where Adam had spoken to her for the first time; and perhaps her child might at that very moment be lying under it--frozen to death. "It is night, and we can see nothing, and the snow is falling faster than ever," cried Haespele; "fetch torches, ring the alarm bell; we must ask the Pastor to let us do so; come straight to the Parsonage." Martina, however, was taken home, and when she saw the boots on the table, she sobbed more than ever, saying: "Alas! how proud he was of them, and now his dear little feet are frozen--cold--dead!" The women round Martina tried to comfort her, and one of them said, with the kindest intentions, that to be frozen to death was the easiest of all deaths; it was simply falling asleep, and never awaking.