On such nights as those--gray, cloudy nights--the hemp-beater narrates
his strange adventures with will-o'-the-wisps and white hares, souls in
torment and witches transformed into wolves, the witches' dance at the
cross-roads and prophetic night-owls in the grave-yard. I remember
passing the early hours of the night thus around the moving flails,
whose pitiless blow, interrupting the beater's tale at the most exciting
point, caused a cold shiver to run through our veins. Often, too, the
goodman went on talking as he worked; and four or five words would be
lost: awful words, of course, which we dared not ask him to repeat, and
the omission of which imparted a more awe-inspiring mystery to the
mysteries, sufficiently harrowing before, of his narrative. In vain did
the servants warn us that it was very late to remain out-of-doors, and
that the hour for slumber had long since struck for us; they themselves
were dying with longing to hear more. And with what terror did we
afterward walk through the hamlet on our homeward way! how deep the
church porch seemed, and how dense and black the shadow of the old
trees! As for the grave-yard, that we did not see; we closed our eyes as
we passed it.
But the hemp-beater does not devote himself exclusively to frightening
his hearers any more than the sacristan does; he likes to make them
laugh, he is jocose and sentimental at need, when love and marriage are
to be sung; he it is who collects and retains in his memory the most
ancient ballads and transmits them to posterity.
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