Page - 133 - in The Forest Farm - Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

and now, Schoolmaster, so that you can teach our children a bit of reading! What I said was, ‘Schoolmaster won’t stay with us. A man like that,’ said I, ‘has something better to do. Even if we were to fit up the top room for him and wait upon him as an honoured guest, he wouldn’t stay with us.—And then we can’t give him any school fees,’ I said, ‘and only such poor fare as we have ourselves.—If that’s enough for him, I shall be delighted if he will stay.’” The old man rose from his seat and, in a voice of deep emotion, said: “Oh, you dear, good people! As you yourselves were the first to suggest it, I now venture to implore you. I have nowhere to go, and I hardly dare risk myself in the wilds. Only give me a roof over my head and a spoonful of soup for a few days and I will go back again to Rattenstein and start my entreaties. The people will take pity on me; and surely the parish provisor will not be stony-hearted.” “I wouldn’t throw myself on his mercy exactly, that I wouldn’t,” said the farmer’s wife. “And Heath Peter here was thinking that it would be all right, and that you had better make the house on the heath your home, Schoolmaster, as long as the Lord does not order things differently.” Then little Gabriel suddenly called out something in his sleep. “There, the child’s got the nightmare!” said Klara. And she went to the little bed and, with her thumb, made the sign of the cross on the boy’s forehead. Peter fixed up a bed in the barn for his guest to sleep in that night; and soon all was dark and silent in the house on the heath.