Ludwig Tieck

“ Thou prince of all babbling braggarts! cried Conrad, when the story was ended: Can't you open your mouth, man, without lying? and yet you are already come to years. Folks that hold traffic for any time with spirits, grow sharp-witted. ”

“ Scandal and shame! Murder and house-breaking are not so detestable! and no law against it, no remedy, no mortal skill in the whole wide world.
The others had enough to do to tear the strong old man away from the weakly stranger, on whom he wanted to take personal vengeance.
As Conrad could not get satisfaction in this way, he sat down on the ground in a corner of the hut; and it being a holiday evening, the journeymen lay down round about him, some trying to comfort him, others jeering him. ”

“ He is the most insufferable and rudest miner in the whole country for miles round; and fancies he knows everything better than his neighbours, and is the cleverest fellow in the world.
— They say he is running about like a madman, and as if the fiend had got hold of him, continued the narrator; for now the very thing of which he has bragged from morning to night, is at an end: he has not only been forced to see corn growing in the field, he has lain in the midst of it.
Edward turned to the speaker and askt:
— Michael, are you quite well again already, that you come out thus into the open air? ”

“ Among the rest there was a grizzly-bearded journeyman who worried and annoyed me most of all, a giant of a fellow, and all along with it so cunning, with such a sharp sting in his tongue, that one could not possibly help being vext, however stedfastly one might have made up ones mind and determined with oneself at morning prayers, not to allow the gall to mount into ones throat. ”

“ It will fall out now and then that one or other of us gets maimed in this way; for fire is not a thing to be jested with: but God has blest us in giving us our old master; for even if a fellow were to become stark blind, he would never let him starve or want.
The workmen were gone back to the anvil, and Edward then first observed that Eleazar had come into the hut, and was talking to a stranger. This was the travelling miner, the planner of the disgrace inflicted upon old Conrad, which of all mortifications he could have endured was the bitterest. ”

“ In my distress I often cried with anger; for in the town I had fancied myself a clever fellow, and my unruly tongue had made many a one tremble. One night when I was thoroughly harast and woebegone, I was lying over there on the jutting crag all alone in a little bit of a room — the only other person in the house was a woman as old as the mountains — on the sudden I heard something stirring and scraping near me. I opened the window shutter at my head a little, and as the half moon peept into the room, I saw a tiny creature brushing away at my shoes. Who are you? ”

“ When I had got through my apprenticeship, said Michael, at the mountain-town twenty miles from here, and was now come to work at old master Berenger's forge, I used to be plagued at first and quizzed by the other journeymen, as every younker is when he is fresh. ”

“ All lookt at the stranger in anxious expectation. He thrust a little bit of wood down into the box, while he muttered some sounds, and then he drew it out again burning and flickering. Eleazar, who sat next to him, received it, gave it to his neighbour, and thus the match went on spitting sparks from one hand to another. ”

“ He goes round to the houses where he likes the folks, and helps them in their housekeeping, now in one thing, now in another. Cleaning everything is his darling employment. He can't bear dust; dirty sooty pots and other kitchenware are his aversion ”