THE

HE MOSS WOMAN.

'For pitee renneth sone in gentil herte.'

HE Moss or Wood Folk dwelt in the forests

of Southern Germany. Their stature was small and their form strange and uncouth, bearing a strong resemblance to certain trees with which they flourished and decayed:-fit residents for the wooded solitudes that for many a league shade the banks of that romantic river which begins its course in the Black Forest and ends it in the Black Sea.

They were a simple, timid, and inoffensive race, and had little intercourse with mankind; approaching only at rare intervals the lonely cabin of the woodman or forester, to borrow some article of domestic use, or to beg a little of the food which the good wife was preparing for the family meal. They would also for similar purposes appear to labourers in the fields which lay on the outskirts of the forests. Happy they so visited, for loan or gift to the Moss-people was always repaid manifold!

But the most highly prized and eagerly coveted of all mortal gifts was a draught from the maternal breast to their own little ones; for this they held to be a sovereign remedy for all the ills to which their natures were subject. Yet was it only in the extremity of danger that they could so overcome their natural diffidence and timidity as to ask this boon for they knew that mortal mothers turned from such nurslings with disgust and fear.

It would appear that the Moss or Wood Folk also lived in some parts of Scandinavia. Thus we are told that in the churchyard of Store Hedding, in Zealand, there are the remains of an oak wood which were trees by day and warriors by night.

THE MOSS-WOMAN AND THE IDOW.

A Tale of Southern Germany.

IS the looked-for hour of noontide rest, And, with face upturned and open vest, The weary mowers asleep are laid

On the swathes their sinewy arms have made :
The rakers have gone to the woodland's edge
That skirts the field like a giant hedge,
Shelter to seek from the blinding heat,
And their humble midday meal to eat.

But one there is in that rustic band
With slender form and delicate hand,
Whose voice a tone of sorrow bears,
And whose face a shade of sadness wears:
She knitting sits apart from the rest,
With a rosy infant at her breast,

Who has played or slept in the fragrant hay,
Near his mother at work in the field all day.

Said Karl, when he led his comely bride
To his cottage down by the Danube side-
'I'll work till arm and back shall break,
Ere Röschen ever touch fork or rake.'

But, alas for Karl! the fever came,
Stricken was many a stalwart frame,

And his Röschen the widow's tear has shed
O'er the grave where his manly form was laid.

Into the swarthy forest shade

Her pensive eye has aimless strayed,
Till it sadly rests on what seems to be
The limb of a prostrate moss-grown tree:
Suddenly down her knitting she flings,
Up to her feet with her child she springs,
For creeping silently, stealthily,

Comes the limb of the prostrate moss-grown tree.

Still on it comes, creeping silently,
Then rises erect by Röschen's knee.
'A Moss-woman!' the haymakers cry,
And over the fields in terror they fly.
She is loosely clad from neck to foot,
In a mantle of moss from the maple's root,
And like lichen grey on its stem that grows
Is the hair that over her mantle flows.

Her skin like the maple-rind is hard,
Brown and ridgy and furrowed and scarred;
And each feature flat, like the mark we see
Where a bough has been lopped from the
bole of a tree,

When the inner bark has crept healingly round And laps o'er the edge of the open wound: Her knotty, root-like feet are bare;

And her height is an ell from heel to hair.

A Moss-child clasped in her arms she holds,
Tenderly wrapped in her mantle folds;
A ghastly thing, as huelessly white

As the silver birch in the cold moonlight:
She cries to Röschen, in accents wild-
'It is sick, it will die; oh save my child!
Oh take to your breast my little one,
For the pitying love you bear your own!'

The haymakers one by one appear,
And then in a whispering crowd draw near;
As Röschen there with her child they see,
They call to her loudly and urgently:
But clinging about her the Moss-woman stands,
With the strength of despair in her clutching
hands,

And the tone of despair in her accents wild'In pity, in pity, oh save my child!'

Then Röschen turns and solemnly cries-
'May I ne'er be laid where my husband lies;
May my own child perish before my face,
And I never look on his resting-place,

D