The steward and Oswald lifted the man, who was perfectly motionless, out of the wagon, and carried him, bending low, through the house-door through a narrow passage into the low room, where they put him on a broad bed with a blue counterpane. The old woman followed them, asked the steward to help her in undressing the man, and then said to him: "Well, you can go now. Mr. Stein and I can manage Jake." The steward was very glad to receive permission to go. With a few unintelligible words he left the room, and Oswald saw through the window how he took a long pull from his bottle before he mounted his horse, as if he were standing in special need of some such refreshment after the unusual physical and mental efforts which he had made. Oswald had taken a seat on a low settee near the small open window. He looked around him and saw, at the first glance, that a good spirit was prevailing in the humble cottage in spite of the coarse drunkard on his bed. The bed itself was freshly covered; the ceiling and the walls were scrupulously clean, the floor sprinkled with white sand. The air in the room was fresh and sweet; the small window-panes as bright as their old age and greenish hue would permit Mother Claus had seated herself by the bed and performed, as it seemed to Oswald, some mysterious, perhaps magnetic, passes over the sick man, who had apparently fallen into a pleasant sleep. She rose and said: "I will put the children to bed, if you will stay here while I am away." When Oswald promised to do so, she went away; but after a quarter of an hour she came back and sat down by the young man near the window. She had her knitting in her hand, and knit with marvellous rapidity, for one so old, a little baby's sock. There she sat, now listening for the sick man's breathing, and now counting the meshes of her knitting; at times glancing at Oswald with a look of kindly interest from her gray, deep-set eyes. "I know what that is," she said suddenly, as a bright ray from the setting sun fell through the window upon Oswald's face. "I must have seen you before." "Why, to be sure," said Oswald, "yesterday, on the heath." "No, no--not yesterday, no, a few years ago--perhaps forty--let me see, fifty years ago." "How old are you, Mother Claus?" asked Oswald, surprised to hear her speak of forty and fifty years as a few years. "I'll be eighty-two next Christmas coming," replied the old woman, resuming her knitting as if she had been warned that she would not have much time left. "Eighty-two!" cried Oswald, astonished; "and have you lived all the time in this village?" "Yes, here and at the big house. I was born there, on Holy Christmas Eve, in the year one thousand seven hundred and sixty-four, on the same day and in the same hour as the father of the late baron----" "How long is it since he died?"