Six months passed and Hans had striven to remember so many things since the day of the warning that he had all but forgotten the words of Kahnale. Lying atop the dyke, Hans gave the magician never a thought. The boy drew pictures in the loose sand with the toe of his sabot and brushed them away one after the other. At last he completed a design which struck his fancy and he ceased work to admire it. He had drawn a large heart and exactly in the center he had written "Gretchen." It may have been a charm or a coincidence, but he looked up from the sand design just in time to see her passing along the road which ran parallel to the dyke. He shouted after her, but it was a capricious day with Gretchen, and she went along about her business without once looking back, under the pretense that she had not heard the greeting. Hans raged and made as if to demolish the heart, and Gretchen, and indeed the whole dyke, but then he thought of something better. He got up and entering the house of Kahnale, went into the back room without even stopping to rattle the skeletons. The room was empty and Hans rummaged behind the long row of magic books until he found the old volume which he felt sure would give him some of the needful secrets which had been withheld from him. Opening the book, he blew away a thick top soil of ancient dust and was chagrined to find that whatever knowledge lay before him was concealed in some language so ancient that he could not understand a single word. "Perhaps," he thought to himself, "this is a charm I can set to ticking even if I can't understand it." Fearing that Kahnale might come upon him, he hid the book under his coat and carried it out to his retreat on top of the dyke. In a low voice he began to read the strange and fearsome sentences in the book. Although they meant nothing to him, they possessed a fine rolling cadence which captured his fancy, and more boldly and more loudly Hans went on with his reading.