"A Christmas present! He asks me for a Christmas present!"
When he reached the chicken house, he stood still, leaning against the fence. The chickens clustered about him with crowings and squawkings, some flying to his shoulders. Birds and beasts and insects loved and trusted poor William if human beings did not. It was possible for him to go about among his bees and handle them as he would without fear of stings.
Now he paid no heed to the flapping, eager fowl, except to thrust them away from him. He stood leaning against the fence and looking down upon the gray landscape. It was not yet quite daylight and the morning was cloudy. The depression in his forehead deepened; he was looking fixedly at one spot, John Hartman's house, as though he had never seen it before, or as though he meant to fix it in his mind forever.
The Hartman house was always there. He had seen it a thousand times, would see it a thousand times more. On moonlight nights, its wide roofs glittered, on dark nights a gleaming lamp set on a post before the door fixed it in place. In winter its light and its great bulk, in summer its girdle of trees, distinguished it from all the other houses in Millerstown. William Koehler could see it from every foot of his little house and garden. It was before his eyes when he worked among his plants, which seemed to love him also, and when he sat for a few minutes on his porch, and when he tended his bees or fed his chickens.
Beyond the Hartman house he did not look. There the country spread out in a wide, cultivated, varicolored plain, with the mountains bounding it far away. To the right of the village was the little cemetery where his wife lay buried, and near it the Lutheran church to which they had both belonged, but he glanced at neither. Sometimes he could see John Hartman helping his wife from the carriage when they returned from church, or stamping the snow from his feet before he stepped into his buggy in the stable yard. Often, at this sight, when there was no one within hearing, William waved his arms and shouted, as though nothing but a wild sound could express his emotion. He was not entirely free from the superstitions in which Bevy and many other Millerstonians believed, superstitions long since seared upon the souls of a persecuted generation in the fatherland. He recited the strange verse, supposed to ward away evil,--