Page - 140 - in The Forest Farm - Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

gun. For the roe cannot be far to seek in this weather. But it grows dark and Lily does not return. The snow falls thicker and heavier, night draws in and Lily does not come. The children by now are crying for their milk; the father is eager to be after his game; the mother sits up in bed: “Lily!” she calls. “Wherever are you, child, trotting about in that pitch-dark forest? Come home!” How can the sick woman’s weak voice reach the wanderer through the fierce snowstorm? As the night grows darker and stormier, Berthold’s craving to go poaching grows deeper, while his fears for his Lily-of-the-Forest rise higher and higher. She is a frail little twelve-year-old girl. True, she knows the precipices and the wooded mountain-paths; but the paths are hidden by the snow and the precipices by the darkness. At last, the man leaves his house to go in search of his child. For hours he roams and shouts through the storm-swept wilderness; the wind fills his eyes and mouth with snow; he has to put forth all his strength to get back to his hut. And now two days pass. The snow keeps on falling; Berthold’s hut is almost snowed in. They do their noisy best to console themselves: Lily is sure to be at the hermit’s. This hope is destroyed on the third day, when Berthold, after struggling for hours over the snow-clad landscape, succeeds in reaching the hermitage. True, Lily was at the hermit’s three days ago, but left early on her way home with the milk-pot. “Then my Lily-of-the-Forest lies buried in the snow,” says Berthold. Whereupon he goes to other wood-cutters and begs, as no one has ever seen this man beg before, that they will come and help him look for his dead child. They find Lily-of-the-Forest on the evening of the same day. Down a lonely forest-glen, in a dark and tangled thicket of young pines and larches, through which no snowflake can make its way and upon which the loads of snow lie heaped and arched till the young branches groan again, in this thicket Forest-Lily is found sitting on the ground, on the dry pine-needles, amid a family of six roe-deer. It is a very wonderful story. The child, returning home, lost her way in the forest-glen; and, as she was no longer able to cope with the masses of snow, she crept into the dry thicket to rest. She did not long remain alone. Hardly