red blood stained the glimmering white ground.

His breath failed, but he did not cease to search, look, examine.

Yonder, where for the length of a man the snow had vanished and grass and
brown earth appeared, people had fought together, and there--Holy Virgin!
What was this!--there lay his father's hammer. He knew it only too well;
it was the smaller one, which to distinguish it from the two larger
tools, Goliath and Samson, he called David-the boy had swung it
a hundred times himself.

His heart stood still, and when he found some freshly-hewn pine-boughs,
and a fir-trunk that had been rejected by one of the men, he said to
himself: "The bier was made here," and his vivid imagination showed him
his father fighting, struck down, and then a mournful funeral procession.
Exulting bailiffs bore a tall strong-limbed corpse, and a slender, black-
robed body, his father and his teacher. Then came the quiet, beautiful
wife and Ruth in bonds, and behind them Marx and Rahel. He distinctly
saw all this; it even seemed as if he heard the sobs of the women, and
wailing bitterly, he thrust his hands in his floating locks and ran to
and fro. Suddenly he thought that the troopers would return to seize him
also. Away, away! anywhere--away! a voice roared and buzzed in his
ears, and he set out on a run towards the south, always towards the
south.

The boy had not eaten a mouthful, since the oatmeal porridge obtained at
the charcoal-burner's, in the morning, but felt neither hunger nor
thirst, and dashed on and on without heeding the way.

Long after his father had left the clearing for the second time, he still