The ship lay a few paces off the shore in deeper water. Sali lifted Vreni in his arms high up, and began to wade through the water towards the boat. But she caressed him so fervently and wriggled like a fish on the angle, that Sali was losing his footing in the rather strong current. She strained her hands and arms in order to plunge them in the water, crying: "I also want to try the cool water. Do you remember how cold and moist our hands were when we first met? That time we had been catching fish. Now we ourselves will be fish, and two big and handsome ones to boot." "Keep still, you wriggling darling," said Sali, scarcely able to stand up in the water, with his sweetheart tossing in his arms and the current pulling at him, "or it will drag me under!" But now he lifted his pretty burden into the boat, and scrambled up its side himself. Then he hoisted her up to the hay, packed in orderly fashion in the middle, sweet-scented and downy like a vast pillow, and next he swung himself up to her. When they both were thus enthroned on their bridal bed the ship drifted gently into the middle of the stream, and then, turning slowly, it headed sluggishly in an easterly direction. The river flowed through dark woods, shadowing it; it flowed through the fruitful plain, past quiet villages and hamlets and single homesteads; there it broadened out like a still lake and the ship moved but slightly downwards, and here it turned tall rocks and left the slumbering landscape quickly behind. And when dawn broke there was in sight at some distance a town rising with its age-worn towers and steeples above the silver-gray river. The setting moon, red as gold, cast a quivering track of light upstream towards the dim outlines of the ancient city, and into this luminous bed the ship finally turned its prow. When the houses of the town at last approached closely two pale shapes, locked in a tight embrace, glided in the autumnal frost of early morn from off the dark mass of the ship into the silent waters. The ship itself shortly after fetched up near a bridge, unharmed, and remained there. When sometime later the two bodies, still locked in each others' arms, were found, and details about the young man and his sweetheart were learned, one might have read in the newspapers that these two, the children of two ruined and impoverished families that had lived in bitter enmity, had sought death in the water together after dancing with great animation at a kermess. This event probably was connected with the other fact that a boat laden with hay had landed in town without anyone on board. It was supposed that the young couple had cut loose the boat somewhere in order to hold their godforsaken wedding on it. "Once again a proof of the spread of lawless and impious passion among the lower classes." That was the concluding paragraph in the newspaper report. FOOTNOTE: [Footnote 1: Vreni, Vreneli, Vreeli; Swiss diminutive forms of Veronica.]