And he started to count them, and counted over and over, and it was at no time thirty-two, and so he resumed his count. The girl kept patient for a long time, but at last she got up and said: "Now I will count yours." And the boy lay down amongst the herbs, the little one above him, and she embraced his head, he opened wide his mouth, and she began to count: One, two, seven, five, two, one; for the little thing knew not yet how to count. The boy corrected her and instructed her how to go about it, and thus she also started again and again, and curiously enough it was precisely this little game that pleased them best of all that day. But at last the little girl sank down on the soft couch of herbs, and the two children fell asleep in the full glare of the noon sun. Meanwhile the fathers had finished their job of plowing and had changed the stubble field into a brown plain, strongly scenting the earth. When at the end of the last furrow the helper of one of the two wanted to stop, his master shouted: "Why do you stop? Turn up another furrow!" "But we're done," said the helper. "Shut your mouth, and do what I tell you," replied the other. And they did turn once more and tore a big furrow right into the middle, the ownerless, field, so that weeds and stones flew about. But the peasant took no time to remove these. Probably he considered that there was ample time for that some other day. He was satisfied to do the thing for the nonce only in its main feature. Thus he went up the height softly, and when up on top and the delicious play of the wind now turned once more the tip of his white cap backwards, on the other side of the fallow field the second peasant was just plowing a similar furrow, the wind having also reversed the tip of his cap, and cut also a goodly furrow off from the same fallow field. Each of them saw, of course, what the other did, but neither seemed to do so, and thus they once more strode away one from the other, each falling star finally disappearing below the curve of the ground. Thus the woof of Fate spins its net around us, "and what he weaves no weaver knows." One harvest after another went by and the two children grew steadily taller and handsomer, and the ownerless fields as steadily smaller between the two neighbors. With every new plowing the section between lost hither and thither one furrow, without there being a word said about it, and without a human eye apparently noting the misdeed. The stones and rocks became more and more compact and formed already a perfect and continuous ridge the whole length of the field, and the shrubs and weeds on it had already attained such an altitude that the two children, although they, too, had grown, could no longer see each other across them.