She said I ought to go to sleep now, and she covered the window with a cloth so that the sun should not shine in my face. But my father seemed to think I ought not to go to sleep yet: he wanted to know how I had got away from the servant without his noticing it, and where I had been wandering. I at once related how I had lost the path, and how I got into the wilderness; and when I had told them about the moon and the black forests, and about the soughing of the wind and the rocky precipice, my father said under his breath to my mother, "Wife, let us give God praise and thanks that he is here--he has been on the Troll's rock!" At these words my mother gave me a kiss on the cheek, a thing she did but seldom, and then she put her apron before her face and went away. "Well, you young scaramouch, and how did you get home after all?" asked my father. I said I didn't know; that after a prolonged sleeping and rocking, I found myself at our door, and that Moss-Maggie had stood beside me. My father asked me yet again about this circumstance, but I told him I hadn't got anything else to say about it. My father then said he must be off to High Mass in the church, because to-day was Christmas Day; and he bade me go to sleep. I must have slept many hours after that, for when I awoke it was twilight outside, and in the dwelling-room it was nearly dark. My grandmother sat nodding beside my bed, and from the kitchen I heard the crackling of the fire on the hearth. Later, when the servants were all sitting at the evening meal, Moss-Maggie was with them at table. During the morning service she had been out in the churchyard, cowering on her husband's grave; and after High Mass my father went and found her there and brought her with him to our house. They could get nothing out of her about the event of the night, save that she had been searching for the Christchild in the forest. Then she came over to my bed and looked at me, and I was scared at her eyes. In the back part of our house was a room in which there were only old, useless things and a lot of cobwebs. This room my father gave Moss-Maggie for a dwelling, and put a stove and a bed and a table in it for her. And she stayed with us. She would still very often go rambling about in the forest, and bring home moss, and then return and sit for hours upon her husband's grave; from which she could never more tear herself away to return to her own district--where, indeed, she would have been just as lonely and homeless as everywhere else. Of her circumstances we could learn nothing more definite: we could only conjecture that the woman had once been happy and certainly in her right mind; and that grief for the loss of her mate had robbed her of reason.