To be sure, the turpentine ran faster and clearer than ever from the trees, but then it was worth less to the old Jew who bought it, and the striped red serge and rancid oil were dearer than ever; so the children ate their supper by the light of the pine-cones they gathered in the forest, and went to bed to keep warm, where Mihal, the youngest boy, told them long stories of the old days in Bohemia, when there were fierce witches with steeple-crowned hats and flame-colored cloaks, who were burned to death in the market-place of Prague, and their ashes scattered on the waters of the Elbe, to find no rest on earth or in the water,--and legends of gnomes and elves that worked with little swarthy hands in the mountain mines, and hid their treasures away from human miners, unless spell and incantation brought them to light, and then the gnomes would scream and sob in the deep caverns till the miners fled away for fear. These stories Mihal had learned from his old grandmother, who died the year before the famine. She used to sit in the open air knitting, or spinning with a distaff, and the scarlet yarn that trailed across the gray jacket and green petticoat glowed in the sun like a thread of crawling fire, and seemed to keep time to her droning voice, as she poured story after story into the wide-open ears of the child nestled on her feet. But all these pretty tales of Mihal did not keep his eight brothers and sisters warm. Zitza, the least of all, cried herself to sleep often, and woke with hunger, wailing, in the sad and quaint accents of her land, for bread and berries. These were sorrowful sounds for poor Otto Koenig; he knew well the eager pain for food that forced that cry from the child's lips,--for his black crust was as small as it could be to keep him alive, and his cup of sour beer was only a quarter filled. Often, as he shouldered the rude axe with which he gashed the trees, and wandered out into the forest, the spicy smell of the pine-boughs seemed to make him sick and giddy, he was so faint with hunger; and instead of the hymns the wind used to sing in the long green tufts of leaves, there was a rush of unearthly whispering laughter, and mocking voices said in the poor man's ear, "Bread and beer! bread and beer!" chorused with another rustle of laughter; whereat the unlucky man, half crazed, would bless himself devoutly, and, taking to his heels, run like a scared cony till the woods were far behind him. In the hut things went worse still; in vain did Matthias, the oldest of the nine children, take his twin sister into the fields to search the brambles for stray hips, or locks of wool the sheep had not left there willingly; men and women even worse off had been there before them, and they came home at night, tired out and footsore, only to hear Zitza's fretful cry for food, and the constant chatter of Meister Hans, croaking for his own share in what they had not.