Page - 16 - in The Forest Farm - Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

don’t mind telling you that you’ll never make a first-rate tailor. Your song now, that’s a masterpiece if you like. Now, don’t you forget, that down here on the plain and in the farmer’s oat-straw I told you how it would be—you’ll never remain a tailor. You’ll go to the towns and become somebody; you’ll be a bookbinder! Mark my word, in the end you’ll become a bookbinder!” That was the highest the shoemaker’s apprentice could conceive of. But it soon happened otherwise. Passing tourists had come across the verses which the country folk had already set to music, and they encouraged the author to send certain of them to town. As a result, the editor of the Graz Daily Post took an interest in the people’s poet, and asked him to send him all the poetry he had written and to give him an account of his life. Peter packed up, and, carrying a bundle of manuscripts weighing fifteen pounds, set off on his way to Graz. The postage for such a parcel would have been quite beyond his means. II At the end of 1864 an article appeared in the Graz Daily Post, entitled A Styrian Poet of the People, in which a larger public was called upon to assist the young talented writer. And now from all quarters sendings poured into the post office in Krieglach—congratulations, books, small sums of money, and provisions. A bookseller in Leibach offered him an apprenticeship. Rosegger accepted it, but after a few days Heimweh again drove him from the unfamiliar district. However, a free scholarship was found for him at the Graz Commercial Academy; friends and teachers were not wanting, and here, between the years 1865–9 the farmer’s son, not yet able, when he entered it, to write correctly, received an intellectual training which left him no longer inferior to the well educated. In the same year that he left this institution his first book, a volume of poems in dialect, and entitled Zither und Hackbrett (Zither and Dulcimer), was published. A second collection, Tannenharz und Fichtennadeln (Pine-resin and Fir-needles), came out in the following year; and in 1870 also appeared his first picture of Styrian peasant life, Sittenbilder aus dem Steierischen Oberlande. These won him some fame; already publishers began to approach him with offers. And now once more miracle entered his life. In the summer of 1872 a young and beautiful Graz lady, accompanied by a friend, made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of her favourite poet; there by chance she and her poet met, and a year later they were married. Their happy life together lasted but a short time; after the birth of a second child the young wife died. Six years after his sad loss Rosegger made a second and equally happy marriage. About his life since then there is not much to tell. One fact, however,