Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 July 1885 — German Legends. [ARTICLE]

German Legends.

Germany is the land of legends. Every district, too, has its own peculiar character.- In east Friesland the stories are dark, stern, at times tragic. Even when heathen in their origin, they have been remodeled by the spirit of a firm Protestant faith. In central Germany, they are brighter and more humorous, occasionally more grotesque. The deepest note they touch is a certain pensive -tenderness; and hardly a trace of conscious Christianity is to be found among them, though here and there in the memory of a saint now forgotten in the district may be found a strange combination with other materials. In the Austrian Alps, again, they are more graceful, imaginative, pathetic, and almost invariably strongly colored by Catholicism. Thus, the Frau Berchta or Frau Hohle of other districts here becomes the wife of Pilate* to whom popular fancy has assigned a sad but ignoble fate in the other world. As she confessed the truth and yet was not baptized, her spirit is doomed to wander through the earth until the judgment day, and to her the souls of all unbaptized children are gathered. Summer nights, she leads them through the corn and the flax fields, where they pick off the mildewed ears and harmful insects, and bear them away in their little pitchers; but inwinter, particularly about Christmas time, the strange procession will sometimes pass through a village in which an inconsolate mother dwells, and then a little hand will tap at the window, and when the mourner looks out she will see her child, no lohger the baby they carried to the churchyard six months ago but a. bright little thing whom, if it had a living body, one would take to.be three or four years old. Yet she knows at once that

it is her own, and it says: “Mothei you must stop crying. All your tear! fall into my pitcher; it has grown sc heavy that I can hardly carry it, and they drip down on my clothes and make them so cold and cumbersome that I can scarcely keep up with the rest.” If the mother glances,down the street, she will see a form ,80 bright “that you might have taken it for Our Lady’s," with a throng of little children crowding around her, “as if they loved her.”