_The Forest Folk_


Strange trades are carried on in this wilderness. These people literally
dig their bread out of earth and stone and ant-heaps, scrape it off the
trees, distill it out of uneatable fruit. There is the root-digger,
whose booty of mountain ovens is said to go to far Turkey to be turned
into scent. He would long have given up digging, to live entirely on
poaching, but for his hope to unearth some day treasure of gold and
jewels. One of these "forest-devils" has just died. He never worked at
all. His profession was eating. He went from village to village and from
fair to fair, eating cloth and leather, nails, glass, stones, to the
amazement of his audience. He died from eating a poisonous root given
him by some unknown digger--they say it was the devil himself. His
funeral oration was delivered by a pale, bent, quiet man, known as the
Solitary, of whose life nobody can give one any information.

Then there is the pitch-boiler. You can smell him from afar, and see him
glitter through the thicket. His pitch-oil is bought by the wood-cutter
for his wounds, by the charcoal-burner for his burns, by the carter for
his horse, by the brandy-distiller for his casks. It is a remedy for all
ailments. The most dangerous of all the forest-devils is the
brandy-distiller. He is better dressed than the others, has a kind word
for everybody, and plays the tempter with but too great success.

Black Matthias is dying in his miserable hut. His little boy and girl
are playing around him, and his wife bids them be silent. "Let them
shout," says Matthias; "but try and keep down Lazarus' temper." On his
death-bed Matthias told me the story of his life--how he, a jolly, happy
fellow, fell into the recruiting-officers' trap, escaped from their