They no longer went to the field together, since ten-year-old Salomon, or Sali, as he was mostly called, now kept with the bigger boys or the men, and dusky Vreni,[1] though a fiery little thing, had already to place herself under the supervision of those of her sex, for fear of being laughed at as a tomboy. In spite of all that they improved the occasion of the harvest, when everybody was out in the fields, to climb once on top of the huge stony ridge, or breastworks, which ordinarily divided them, and to wage a toy war, pushing each other down from it, as the culmination of the battle. Even though they had no longer anything more to do with each other, this annual ceremony was maintained by them all the more carefully since the land of their fathers did not meet anywhere else. However, now the fallow field was to be sold, after all, and the sum realized provisionally kept by the authorities. The day came at last, and the public sale took place on the spot itself. But beside Manz and Marti there were present only a few curious ones, since nobody but they felt like buying the odd piece of ground and cultivating it between the property of the two peasants. For although these two belonged among the best farmers of the village, and had done nothing but what two-thirds of the others would also have done under like circumstances, still now they were looked at askance because of it, and nobody wanted to be squeezed in between them in the diminished and orphaned field. For most men are so made as to be quite ready to commit a wrong which is more or less in vogue, especially if the circumstances of the case facilitate the wrong. But as soon as the wrong has been perpetrated by some one else, they are glad that it was not they who had been exposed to the temptation, and then they regard the guilty one almost as a warning example in regard to their own failings, and treat him with a delicate aversion as a sort of lightning rod of evil itself, as one marked by the gods themselves, while all the while their mouths are watering for the advantages thus accrued to him by means of his sin. Manz and Marti were, therefore, the only ones who seriously bid on the ownerless land, and after a rather spirited contest, during which the price was driven up higher than had been supposed, it was Manz to whom it was awarded. The officials and the lookers-on soon drifted away, and the two neighbors who had been busy on their fields after the sale, met again, and Marti said: "I suppose you will now put your land, the old and the new, together, halve it, and work it in that way? That, at least, is what I should have done if I had got the land."