I had a fresh fright at that time. Prompted by curiosity to see the godless fellows once more and to spy out whether the devil, in the guise of a wood-cutter, was helping them with their work, I peeped one day from the forest path and through the thicket at their work-place. Then I saw that they were making coffins. I announced the fact at home and caused the greatest excitement in consequence. "As I said, they have some fresh thing in their minds!" said my mother. Father suggested: "Boy, you have been dreaming again, in broad daylight. Still, I will go and see." We went into the woods. My father peered through the thicket at the wood-cutters; and then I saw him turn pale. "You half-wit!"[8] he said; and then he groaned. "They're burying every peasant of us at Alpel!" The coffins were stacked in great piles; and the men were still chopping and trimming new ones with their axes. We rushed away to inform the local magistrate, who, at that time, lived on the mountain on the other side of the Engthal, and tell him what we had seen. On the road to his house we met Michel the carpenter, to whom my father said that he had better have all his knives and choppers ready, for it looked as if we were in for bad times. The strangers who were working in his wood did nothing but make coffins. "Yes," said Michel, "I've noticed that too: it's a good thing the coffins are not hollow!" And the man of experience told us of the shape of the railway-sleepers, which were usually cut from the block in pairs, before being sawn asunder, and which, with their six corners, looked not unlike a coffin. We turned back then and there, and as we went along the edge of the field, where the grass was nice and smooth, my father said to me: "This gives us a good chance of laughing at ourselves, lest others should. That's the way things go: when we've fallen out with a man, we put down everything that's bad to him and are as blind as if Satan had stuck his horns into our eyes. When all is said, even those two wood-cutters are not so black as they appear to be. Still, I shall be glad when they have cleared out. And this much I do know: Clements buys no more larch of me." "Because you have none left," was my wise comment on that. Father did not seem to hear. The wood-cutters went at last and the larch-wood sleepers with them. The red-brown stumps remained behind; and in their pores stood bright drops of rosin. "It shows that they were not Christians," I remember my father saying, "that they did not cut a cross in a single stump."