Page - 56 - in The Forest Farm - Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

it’s gone and struck little Maxel’s!” “We must go and see if we can’t do something to help,” said my father. “Help, would you?” rejoined the other. “Where the thunderbolt falls, I shan’t meddle! Man mustn’t work against his Maker, and if He casts fire upon a house He certainly intends that house to burn. Besides, you know, anything struck by lightning can’t be quenched!” “Nor your idiocy neither!” cried my father; and then, angry as I had seldom seen him, he shouted in his face, “You’ve been struck silly!” He left him standing there, and took me by the hand and quickly away. We descended into the Engtal and went along by the Fresenbach, where we could see the fire no longer, only the fiery clouds. My father carried a two-handled pail, and I advised him to fill it at the Fresen. My father didn’t listen, but said several times to himself, “Maxel—to think of that happening to Maxel!” I knew little Maxel quite well. He was an active, cheery little chap, somewhere in the forties; his face was full of pock-marks, and his hands were brown and rough as the bark of the forest trees. So long as I could remember he had been a woodcutter in Waldbach. “If it was anyone else’s house that was burning down,” said my father, “well—it would just be his house burning down!” “Isn’t it the same with little Maxel?” I asked. “With him it’s his all that’s being burnt: everything that he had yesterday, and has to-day, and might have had to-morrow.” “D’you mean the lightning has struck Maxel himself?” “It were better so, boy! I don’t grudge him his life—God knows I don’t grudge it him—but if he might have confessed first, and not been in any mortal sin, I could say downright it were best for him if the lightning had struck him too.” “Then he would be already up there in Heaven,” I remarked. “Here, don’t go paddling about in that wet grass. Keep close behind me and catch on by my coat-tail. About Maxel—I’ll tell you something about him.” The path sloped gently upwards. My father said, “It must be about thirty years since Maxel came. Poor people’s child. At first he went out as herdboy among the peasants; later, when he’d grown up a bit, he went in for the woodcutting—a thorough workman, and always industrious and thrifty. When he became foreman, he asked the landlord to allow him to clear the Sour Meadow on the Gfarerhöhe and keep it for life, because he was so mighty set