The Serapion Brethren, Vol. I.Hoffmann, E. T. A. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus)
General
The Serapion Brethren, Vol. I.
Hoffmann, E. T. A. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus)
Fiction
"Long had stout Pehrson Dahlsjoe been dead, his daughter Ulla long lost
sight of and forgotten. Nobody in Falun remembered them. More than
fifty years had gone by since Froebom's luckless wedding-day, when it
chanced that some miners who were making a connection-passage between
two shafts, found, at a depth of three hundred yards, buried in
vitriolated water, the body of a young miner, which seemed, when they
brought it to the daylight, to be turned to stone.
"The young man looked as if he were lying in a deep sleep, so perfectly
preserved were the features of his lace, so wholly without trace of
decay his new suit of miner's clothes, and even the flowers in his
breast. The people of the neighbourhood all collected round the young
man, but no one recognized him or could say who he had been, and none
of the workmen missed any comrade.
"The body was going to be taken to Falun, when out of the distance an
old, old woman came creeping slowly and painfully up on crutches.
"Here's the old St. John's Day grandmother!' the miners said. They had
given her this name because they had noticed that she came always every
year on St. John's Day up to the main shaft, and looked down into its
depths, weeping, lamenting, and wringing her hands as she crept round
it, then going away again.
"The moment she saw the body she threw away her crutches, lifted her
arms to Heaven, and cried, in the most heartrending accents of the
deepest lamentation:
"'Oh! Elis Froebom! Oh, my sweet, sweet bridegroom!'
"And she cowered down beside the body, took the stony hands and pressed
them to her heart, chilled with age, but throbbing still with the
fondest love, like some naphtha flame under the surface ice.
"'Ah!' she said, looking round at the spectators, 'nobody, nobody among
you all, remembers poor Ulla Dahlsjoe, this poor boy's happy bride
fifty long years ago. When I went away, in my terrible sorrow and
despair, to Ornaes, old Torbern comforted me, and told me I should see
my poor Elis, who was buried in the rock upon our wedding-day, yet once
more here upon earth. And I have come every year and looked for him,
all longing and faithful love. And now this blessed meeting has been
granted me this day. Oh, Elis! Elis! my beloved husband!'
"She wound her arms about him as if she would never part from him more,
and the people all stood round in the deepest emotion.
"Fainter and fainter grew her sobs and sighs, till they ceased to be
audible.
"The miners closed round. They would have raised poor Ulla, but she had
breathed out her life upon her bridegroom's body. The spectators
noticed now that it was beginning to crumble into dust. The appearance
of petrifaction had been deceptive.
"In the church of Copparberg, where they were to have been married
fifty years before, they laid in the earth the ashes of Elis Froebom,
and with them the body of her who had been thus 'Faithful unto death.'"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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