"Oh, you dear, good people! As you yourselves were the first to suggest it, I now venture to implore you. I have nowhere to go, and I hardly dare risk myself in the wilds. Only give me a roof over my head and a spoonful of soup for a few days and I will go back again to Rattenstein and start my entreaties. The people will take pity on me; and surely the parish provisor will not be stony-hearted." "I wouldn't throw myself on his mercy exactly, that I wouldn't," said the farmer's wife. "And Heath Peter here was thinking that it would be all right, and that you had better make the house on the heath your home, Schoolmaster, as long as the Lord does not order things differently." Then little Gabriel suddenly called out something in his sleep. "There, the child's got the nightmare!" said Klara. And she went to the little bed and, with her thumb, made the sign of the cross on the boy's forehead. Peter fixed up a bed in the barn for his guest to sleep in that night; and soon all was dark and silent in the house on the heath. XVI The Stag on the Wall[17] Heidepeter's[18] house was the very last in the Wilderness. It stood on the heath where the forests began, lying very high on a piece of almost level ground. The grey stones showed through the grass in many places before the house. Upon the heath lay numberless rocks patched and traceried with moss. Here and there on the sandy ground between the rocks stood a silver-birch tree whose leaves were for ever whispering and trembling, until in late autumn they were blown away and lost over the moor. This moorland house bore upon the king-post of the big living-room the date 1744; it was the first house ever built in the Wilderness. Peter's forefathers must have been well-to-do, for they possessed much forest and were cattle-breeders as well. The trees had all been cut down and had grown up again, but now Count Frohn--who possessed a fine castle, the Frohnburg, on the other side of the hill, and, neighbouring the heath, a great deal of forest and its hunting, and hitherto a feudal right to the peasants' service--was gradually possessing himself of the squatters' forest as well; so that it had now come to this--that without his permission no tree might be felled nor branch broken. The poor outlying folk of the Wilderness were neglected by all the authorities and courts of justice--indeed, almost forgotten. So they clung to their grain-growing--to the scanty husbandry possible to the place. To the moorland house was now left only the steep fields sloping down to the ravine, and a narrow strip of meadow. Everything else, such as rights of wood and pasture, was heavily burdened with taxation and feudal duty.