When but fourteen she had already been in love with the forester, her cousin, merely because amongst those young men that came before her vision he was the best-looking and the tallest and strongest. He, however, had never noticed the preference shown for him. Indeed he had not given a thought to this overyoung cousin of his, since his serious choice lay altogether among the more adult persons of the other sex, and wavered among several of these. Full of envy and jealousy, this unmature cousin, though, was already so skilled in feminine intrigue as to be able to destroy the chances of two or three young women that the forester had looked upon with favor, using for that purpose that poisonous weapon, gossip and backbiting. Always when he was on the point of proposing to a beauty that had won his regard, this sly half-woman skillfully understood how to spread rumors calculated to entangle the two, fictitious words uttered by one or the other seeming to show mutual dislike, or something equally efficacious in bringing about a rupture. If her designs miscarried with him, why then she spun her threads so as to make the other believe that the swain was false or fickle, full of guile or not dependable. Thus it came to pass repeatedly that without his ever discovering the author the lady of his suit would suddenly swerve and leave him out in the cold, while another, of whom he had never thought in that connection, would as quickly show him her favor--all owing to the arts of this Macchiavell in petticoats. And then impatiently and disgustedly he would turn his back on both the willing and the unwilling and plunge once more for a spell into his easy bachelordom. In this way it was that, one after the other, all his wooings came to nought, until he at last happened to meet the mild and amiable lady that subsequently became his spouse. This one, though, kept hold of him, since she was just as guileless as he himself, and all the artifices and stratagems of the little witch were in vain. Yea, she never even noticed the other's cleverest schemes, simply because she kept her eyes all the time fixed upon him she loved. And indeed he too had been grateful to her for her singlemindedness, and held her all the years of their happy union as a jewel of rare price.