Old Lisbeth sat by the fire and spun, but on the opposite side of the hearth her son Dietrich crouched idle, his cheek upon his hand, gazing into the embers. For many weeks he had been growing more and more silent and listless, and no one could tell what ailed him. Was it that Johanna, the maiden he was courting, had been cruel to him, or was something wrong with his work? His old mother looked across at him and wondered. Outside the wind was blowing, and brought plainly to their ears the sound of the river as it rushed through the valley towards the lake of PÖhlde, that the Hartz-folk call the Tumpensee. Now and then the blast rose to so shrill a pitch that you might have thought a voice was calling from afar; and when this happened, Dietrich would start from his seat and make as though he would rush from the house, but each time he checked himself, and sank with a shiver upon the bench again. At last Lisbeth could bear it no longer.

“What ails thee, son?” she cried. “Art thou bewitched, that a mere gust of wind can set thee all a-tremble?”

Dietrich was silent for a while, casting furtive glances toward door and window, as though he were afraid that his reply might call up some unwelcome sight. At last he answered in a whisper—

“I doubt I am, indeed, mother! Hast thou ever heard tell of voices rising from the river and the lake yonder? Or was any one drowned there these days, that one should see a gleam of red-gold hair beneath the water?”

Lisbeth turned pale.

“Heaven help us!” she exclaimed in a low voice, as though she, too, were afraid of being overheard, “do thou have nothing to do with the river-side or the banks of the lake, Dietrich. That is how men come by their death.”

“But knowest thou anything of it, mother? What is there to fear, if fear there be?” persisted the young man.

“What care I for such tales! Tales there are of spell-bound maidens who call for some one to deliver them, and of water-snakes, and such nonsense; the country is full of them, thou knowest as well as I. But there is no need to believe them,” continued Lisbeth hastily, as if fearing she had said too much. “Do thou take thy Johanna to wife, and bring her home; that will drive all such fancies from thy head.”

A look of pain crossed Dietrich’s face.

“Ah, Johanna!” he exclaimed, “if I could but turn my mind to thoughts of her! Yet I fear she has fancied me cold and neglectful of late.”

“Nay, nay, son,” his mother answered, “Johanna has eyes but for thee; trust my word for it. See, the storm is passing; do thou go over and bid her good-evening, and tell her that the old mother needs some more of that yarn she can spin so stoutly, and thinks she might even bring it over herself, and gladden this house with a sight of her face. There is a gloom hangs about it when she is away, and the sooner she lives with us for good, the better it will be.”

Dietrich took his cap from the peg and opened the door, but as he stood on the threshold, he turned to his mother once more.

“What if I should bring her to harm too?” he said, and was gone.

The old woman mused on by the hearth; her thoughts were not cheerful, for in her secret heart she firmly believed that some water-sprite had indeed bewitched her unlucky boy, but she put a bold face on it, and stuck to the idea that his marriage with Johanna would be the saving of him. Her thoughts would have been sadder still could she have seen how Dietrich swerved from the path that led to Johanna’s cottage, and, almost as though unaware of what he did, wandered down toward the banks of the river. Here, where it joined the lake, the swirling torrent became calmer, and patches of sedge and water-willow grew far out into the stream. It was now growing dusk, and the wind had dropped. As Dietrich paused, standing in the long, dank grass, he heard a sound, scarcely more than a whisper, borne to him on the dying breeze: “Dietrich!” and in a moment again, a little louder: “Dietrich!” A dread, irresistible fascination drew him nearer to the rush-grown banks, and as he went, he heard again and again that voice, calling his name with sweet insistence. And now, far down, almost hidden amid the tangle of willow-boughs and waving blue forget-me-nots that swept the surface of the dark lake, a face appeared—a lovely face, with a bloom as delicate as a rose-leaf or the heart of a shell, and all around it long tresses of red-gold hair floated upon the water.

“Dietrich,” the sweet voice continued, “I have called thee unto seven times. Hast thou not heard? Wilt thou not come and save me?”

Dietrich sprang forward, parting the overhanging boughs, and trying to get a clearer sight of the vision. “How shall I save thee?” he cried, almost in spite of himself, while fear and longing struggled together at his heart, “and who art thou?”

But lo! the face was gone; only a rustling was heard in the bushes, and presently a water-snake reared its head among the reeds, and shooting out its forked tongue, glided towards him. As it came nearer, the same voice sounded again upon the silent air. “Save me by a kiss,” it said. But fear now gained the mastery, and with a cry of horror, Dietrich turned and fled; yet, as his hurrying feet bore him from the water’s edge, the voice pursued him still.

“So mightest thou have broken the spell and saved me,” it wailed, “but thou art afraid! Oh, wretched man, who hast seen my face and fled! And oh, miserable me! for now none may save me, till the oak-tree be sprung from the acorn, and the cradle carved from the oak!”

Almost beside himself, Dietrich reached the top of the river-bank, and hurried through the wood to his cottage, where his mother found him late that night—when she came anxiously out to watch for his coming—lying senseless on the steps of the little porch.

An illness now laid hold upon him, through which Johanna and Lisbeth nursed him with untiring care. During the weary weeks of his slow return to life, Dietrich turned to Johanna as the flower turns to the sunshine; and, indeed, she was his one ray of comfort, and in her presence only could he shake off the gloom that overshadowed him. He was glad enough to obey his mother’s wish, and make Johanna his wife as soon as might be; and the girl’s loving heart did not shrink from the lifelong task of cheering this broken-down man.

So she went to live in the cottage, and in due time a little son, too, came to brighten their home. Dietrich worked as usual again, but always showed an unconquerable dislike to going near the river or the lake; and the sight of a snake was enough to send him into a fit of shuddering terror, such as none could understand.

Time went on, and Johanna fancied that he was becoming more like himself again, till one day he happened to notice, in an open space beside the cottage, a tiny oak sapling springing up from the grass.

“Dost thou know how yonder little tree came there?” he asked of his wife.

“To be sure,” replied Johanna. “One day, when thou wert sick, and I was heavy at heart, and came out here for a breath of air, I found an acorn in the wood, and bethought me of planting it here. ‘If it grows up,’ I thought, ‘I shall take it as a good omen;’ and now, see how it thrives!” Johanna laughed merrily, but Dietrich’s face darkened.

“A good omen,” he murmured. “Who knows? ‘When the oak-tree is sprung from the acorn——’ I cannot read the saying.”

That night Lisbeth said to her daughter-in-law: “My son looks again as he did in those unhappy days. Didst thou not notice the terror-struck look he wore this evening? Heaven help us!”

Johanna laughed it off, but in a few days she said to her mother: “Thou wert right; he goes down to the river-banks again, as he used. What shall we do?”

There seemed nothing to be done. Neither his wife nor his little son could cheer him any longer. Once Johanna saw him stride out to the open patch, and make as though he would have torn the sapling up by the roots, but he suddenly stopped, as though an invisible hand had held him, and turned down through the woods to the river.

He never came back. They said that he had lost his footing in the dusk, and fallen into the deep, reedy pool that lies beneath the steep bank where the river joins the lake. At any rate, he was found there, drowned and dead; and his death was that of old Lisbeth, too, for she never raised her head again after the news was brought to her.

The years rolled on, and young Dietrich, Johanna’s son, grew to be a man. The oak-tree, too, grew tall and strong, and overshadowed the little cottage.

Dietrich the second was a sober-minded fellow, and gave no heed to the maidens, nor could he be got to think of marriage till he was well on in life. He followed the calling of ferryman, and ferried people over the narrow end of the lake, just above the place where the river rushes out of it again. His mother disliked this work for him, and often tried to persuade him to give it up, but he had a fondness for the water. Once he filled her with a great fear.

“There must be something wrong with my hearing,” said he, “for I often fancy my name is called across the water, and I hurry back with my boat, but there is no passenger there.”

Johanna remembered how Lisbeth had told her that it was a voice calling from the water that had bewitched the boy’s father, and she determined her son should not fall a prey to the same fate.

“Dietrich,” said she, “thou must marry. Thou art past thirty now, and over grave even for thy years. I am getting old, and need help in the cottage, too.”

“Have it as thou wilt, mother,” he replied, with a sober smile; “only find me a red-haired maiden. I have ever had a fancy for red-haired women; I do not know whence I got it, for there are not many such hereabouts.”

His mother wondered at what seemed to her an idle speech, and one very unlike her grave son, but she thought little more of it, and presently told him she thought he could not do better than take their neighbour’s daughter Alice to wife; “for, if she is not red-haired,” she said, laughing, “she is red-cheeked, and as merry as a squirrel—a good mate for a grave fellow like thee.”

Dietrich said there was no hurry, but at last, for the sake of peace, he yielded, and was betrothed to Alice.

But before they could be married a strange thing happened. As he sat waiting one day on the bank of the lake beside his empty boat, he heard a sound among the bushes behind him, and looking round, fancied he saw a gleam of red-gold hair through the leaves. At the same time, he could have sworn that a voice quite close to him murmured these words: “Is the oak-tree not yet grown?”

He sprang up and went in search, as he thought, of a would-be passenger, but no one was there; only, as he bent his head down to peer through the under-brush, a slender water-snake glided from amongst it, almost touching his face with its forked tongue—“as though it would have kissed him,” he said afterwards. He started back with a shout of disgust, for he had always had a great dislike to snakes, and snatching up a stone from the ground, threw it at the creature. But it glided away untouched; only, as it went, it gave, so Dietrich swore, such a horrible and piercing scream, that his ears rang with it, and when that dreadful sound died away, all other sounds, too, ceased for him, and he was deaf from that hour.

He went home a graver man than before, and since all attempts to cure his deafness failed, he told Alice that he would give her back her word. But the stout-hearted little woman would not hear of it; she had had many a talk with Johanna, and was persuaded that, since his adventure, Dietrich needed her more than ever. “No such small matter,” she said, “would keep her from the man she loved.”

So these two, also, were wed; though there was but a poor prospect before them, for Dietrich soon saw that his infirmity would oblige him to give up his ferryman’s calling, and that just when he most needed it, for there would before long, he knew, be another mouth to feed in the little hillside cottage.

One spring evening, when the rain was falling and the wind swept the wet branches of the oak-tree right across the roof, Dietrich said to his wife: “I have a mind to cut down that oak-tree, and sell the timber, after I have used some to make a cradle for the little one that is coming. I never could abide the tree, and it now so overshadows the house that it grows damp for want of sun.”

“I planted the tree when thy father was ill,” said old Johanna from her nook by the fire, “and thought that its growth was a good omen for us.”

“It hath brought us but scant luck, that I can see,” rejoined Alice; “perhaps it will be a better omen dead than living.”

So the oak-tree was cut down, and the timber lay for a while and became seasoned; and when Dietrich’s little son, Dietrich the third, was a thriving, sturdy babe of a few months, his father one day brought in the new cradle that he had made him from the fallen oak-tree.

But Johanna’s life seemed to have been cut down with the tree, for that winter she failed and died. And who knows but it was well for her; she was thus spared another grief, for when next spring’s melting snows had swollen the waters of lake and river, Dietrich, whose deaf ears no longer heard the warning rush of the neighbouring waterfall, ventured too near the narrow part of the river, in his haste to get his boat over to the side where his passengers awaited him, and so both boat and man were swept down over the fall; nor was poor Dietrich’s body found for many days.

Now might it indeed have been thought that young Dietrich the third would avoid the fatal lake and river; but from the time he had lain, a rosy babe, in the oaken cradle, he had always been a merry, fearless little fellow, and the shadow that so long had darkened the cottage above the river seemed unable to touch him. He became a fisherman; and when the neighbours shook their heads meaningly, and reminded him that both his father and grandfather had perished in those waters, he would answer, with a cheery smile, that this was no reason why harm should befall him; the luck would turn the third time, he believed; and besides, he would know how to take care of himself, for his mother’s sake. There was no denying that he loved the water, and was successful in his calling, for the fish flocked to his nets as though they had been driven into them. He was fond of the different creatures that dwelt among the reedy banks—the water-fowl, the rats, and even the snakes—and many of them he tamed, so that they would come at his call. His delight was to sit idly rocking in his boat, as the twilight fell and the stars came out above the hill, and to listen to the rush of the river, and the mysterious sounds and calls that echoed across the lake. Then all sorts of strange fancies filled his mind, and amid the voices of the night, he thought he could hear one that called his name, in low, sweet tones, over and over again. This did not frighten him, but rather brought a throb of joy to his heart; and the voice at last grew familiar and dear to him, so that he missed it when storm and cold kept him away from the water for a while. The country-folk told tales, which his mother tried to keep from his ears, of how his grandfather had been driven distraught with terror by the voices that he had heard thus calling from the lake; and he wondered how this might be, and why such things should frighten one. At last he questioned his mother about it, and she replied quietly, for she was a cheery woman, and it was easy to see whence Dietrich got his sunny temper:

“’Tis true thy grandfather was a prey to his fears and fancies, my son, but methinks these fears were all in his own mind, and that nothing from without need have terrified him, if his spirit had but been firm and cheerful within. Thy father had something of the same sad temper, and so men said he too was bewitched; but I have this notion, that the water-folk would hurt none that did not first hurt themselves by their own timid mind. And so I have never withheld thee from the water, for I think thou art of different stuff from thy father, my boy.”

Dietrich nodded his head. “Thou art right, mother,” he said; “and perhaps these beings that call us are but as ourselves, and need our pity and our love.”

A few evenings after this, as he came home through the woods overhanging the river, he was aware of a rustling among the reeds and willows beneath him, and a voice—a voice that sounded strangely familiar to his ear—called from the water: “Ah, Dietrich, Dietrich, save me!”

He dashed down to the river’s brink, and, parting the boughs, saw through the dusk a lovely face gazing up at him—a face with a bloom upon it like a rose, and surrounded by tresses of red-gold hair, that had escaped the comb and floated far out upon the water. Two white hands clung to the branches above, and in an instant Dietrich had waded into the stream, and clasping the hands in his own, had drawn to a safe place upon the bank a slender maiden, who stood leaning against a tree, as she panted for breath and wrung the water-drops from her long tresses.

“Dietrich, I thank thee, for thou knowest no fear,” she presently said in the sweet, low tones that seemed so familiar.

“Fear!” rejoined the lad, with a laugh, though his voice trembled a little; “there was no time for that. What had to be done was to save thee from drowning.”

“Yet others have felt fear,” said the maiden, raising her deep, clear eyes to his. He could see them gleam through the deepening twilight, though he could but indistinctly make out her dress, which seemed rather different from that of the maidens he was wont to meet in the district.

“That is not the sort of fellow I am,” replied Dietrich, with a bold air; “it were strange if one should pause before giving a helping hand to any creature in need, let alone so fair a one as thou.”

He blushed as he spoke, and a strange fancy shot into his mind; but the maiden’s hapless plight, as she stood wringing the water from her garments, dismissed all other thoughts, and he continued: “Let me take thee quickly to my mother, who will dry thy garments and give thee shelter.”

“Nay, not to-night, Dietrich,” said the maiden. “I was on my way to some kinsfolk hard by, when I slipped from the path into the river, and theirs is the shelter I must seek out.”

He thought there was a mischievous gleam in her eyes as she spoke, but she continued more gravely: “Yet give thy mother greeting from me, and say I would gladly come and see her soon, for my kinsfolk have known thine this many a day, and I have often longed to climb to the cottage on the hill.”

The lad leaned forward eagerly; “Oh! let me lead thee there to-night,” he pleaded; “it is surely nearer than any other dwelling, and I am loth to leave thee, alone—and so soon,” he added falteringly.

“Nay, not now, Dietrich,” she repeated, while the merry smile again played over her face; “I am wet, and it is late, and my kinsfolk await me. Only give thy mother my message.”

“And what name doth she know thee by,” he asked, “since thou knowest mine so well?”

“My name is Crystal,” replied the maiden, “but I doubt she will not know me by it—though I know thine so well,” she added, laughing.

“Thou art a strange creature,” said the lad, laughing too, for her gaiety was infectious, “yet a very fair one, and if I may not go with thee, at least I may ask one boon for having saved thee out of the river—the boon of a single kiss.”

But at this Crystal drew back and became grave. “Not from me,” she said softly; “but if thou wouldst yet do anything for my sake, Dietrich, or see me again, give thy kiss to the first dumb thing that shall ask for a caress. That is my last word.” And, turning, she glided so fast through the trees, that she was out of sight in a moment. Dietrich went home, a strange turmoil in his heart, and told his mother of the adventure.

“And the oddest thing is,” he concluded, “that her face looks to me as though I had always known it, had always seen and loved those red-gold tresses coiled about that white brow—and her voice is as the voices that call to me at night-time over the lake. Dost thou know, indeed, who she may be, or what these kinsmen are to whom she is going?”

“I know nothing of them, my son,” replied Alice, “and I do not think we shall ever know aught. Yet do as she bade thee, for it may bring thee good fortune.”

Dietrich spent a sleepless night, and in the morning went down early to the pool between lake and river, where his boat was moored, and sat down to mend his nets on the bank. Yet his hands often lay idle, and his eyes were fixed dreamily upon the reeds before him. Suddenly a rustling among them roused him with a start, and the next moment a water-snake glided forth, and paused beside him. He held out his hand, for the creature looked like one he had tried to tame a while before. The snake drew nearer across the grass, and presently wound itself about his leg, raising its head and shooting out its tongue, as though it would have touched his face. Like a flash, the remembrance of Crystal’s request came into his mind. The snake’s eyes were fixed upon his, and drew him with a strange fascination.

“This is more than I bargained for,” laughed Dietrich aloud, “but for Crystal’s sake I will do it, as I would do anything—wise or foolish—that she bade me. Here is a kiss for thee, then, thou cold, uncanny little creature;” and he kissed the glittering head.

But his lips had scarcely touched it, when a gleeful shout broke from the woods behind him, and the well-known sweet voice, ringing with merriment, cried out: “Dietrich, Dietrich, I am here!”

He started to his feet, and never knew what became of the snake, for in one bound he had cleared the bank, and was clasping Crystal by the hand. She looked fairer than ever in the daylight, which seemed to lend her form more strength and vitality than it had shown the evening before. Her red-gold tresses shone with dewdrops, like a flower in the meadow, and her eyes glowed with life and happiness.

Dietrich’s wooing was short, for he had known from the first moment of beholding Crystal, that here was the only woman in the world for him. And Alice, too, directly she looked into the fair, laughing face, doubted not that luck, in however mysterious a fashion, had come to young Dietrich indeed. There was much talk among the country-folk over the mystery of the young bride’s parentage, and the dower of jewels that so simple a country lass had brought her husband.

Not that they were long in his possession, for Crystal could never bear the sight of them, and they were soon sold, all but one, an ornament of gold shaped like a little snake, with an emerald head, which Dietrich would have her keep. What she told him, in the secrecy of their lovers’ talk, concerning this, and her past existence, will never be known. What is certain is, that a stately farmhouse, with good store of cattle and sheep, rose up in place of the old cottage, on the meadow where the oak-tree had stood. Success followed Dietrich in all he undertook, and the fish thronged to his net more abundantly than before. But those voices of old cried to him no more across the lake, for now, as he turned homewards at evening, it was his dear wife’s voice that sent forth from the farm-yard upon the hill the soft, familiar call: “Dietrich!”

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