It was a fearful night; the storm roared round the house, so that the weak boarding which formed the roof clappered and tumbled, and here and there the rain poured through in streams. The mosquitoes appeared insatiable, and swarmed round the poor tortured ones in an almost unbearable manner. The little children, in particular, alarmed by the novelty of all that surrounded them, would not be quieted, and by their cries increased the strangeness, the unearthliness of their situation; and before them all, still and motionless, careless of mosquitoes, or of any other disturbance, the young woodsman sat beside the bed of his dead wife, which was hung over with a thin mosquito curtain.
Silently he stared into the now bright flaming fire in the chimney, and his left hand all the night through clasped the hand of the corpse. The elder Siebert, it is true, once tried to approach him and to offer consolation, but the unhappy man merely made a sign to him to leave him alone, and stared uninterruptedly into the fire on the hearth. He was beside his wife, and seemed not to remark the presence of the many strangers.
Pastor Hehrmann, seated at the head of the bed where the corpse lay, had collected his family around him, and had spread his large, wide cloak over them, to defend them as well from the annoying insects as from the single drops of rain which penetrated. But, comforting all in their unpleasant position, he concluded a simple but touching prayer, which he spoke aloud, with the words, "May the Almighty make our departure as glad and as happy as our arrival is inauspicious and melancholy."
A loud hearty 'Amen' from every lip replied to this, and then deep silence reigned throughout the house of affliction.
[5] Fences, in America, are formed of poles of wood, split lengthwise, which ordinarily surround the fields in a zig-zag form, and are intended to preserve the grain from the cattle, which run about freely. In the West, where there is wood in abundance, this arrangement is universal; but in the East, and particularly in the vicinity of towns, they are beginning to raise quickset hedges, or at least to apply the wood in the most economical way, so as to make as little wood as possible surround a great space.--_Note by the Author._