Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/92

64 shy, retiring child, who worked with his father in a mine. There he listened with awe to the mysterious sounds that are heard in such places, and believed them to be the whispers, the hammerings and the calls of the gnomes, and his mind took in the marvellous tales of treasures hid in the bowels of the mountains, and of the Kobolds and doomed spirits that are their guardians. He did not play with the other lads of the village, but wandered in the forest, and often remained for days and nights away from home. When he was aged eleven his father died, and he listened to the speech of the Lutheran pastor at the grave, in which the minister exhorted the widow not to sorrow over her dead husband, for he had become an angel in heaven, and spent his time in singing Hallelujah, and looking down on his wife, children and friends on earth, beckoning them to come up to where he sat in glory, and unite their voices with his in the great anthem of praise.

But a doubt awoke in the boy's mind. "If my father was so good to us when alive and he still lives and cares for us, as the pastor says, why does he not revisit us?" He asked the question, but received no satisfactory answer. Brooding over this problem, he speedily arrived at the conviction that he had entered into communion with the spiritual world. He averred that he had accompanying him everywhere a man in grey. He became known throughout the district as one whom the spirits loved to visit and with whom he conversed. Although he attended school till he was aged fifteen, he had not learned to read or to write. He was questioned as to what it was that the spirits said to him. "They tell me more than I am allowed to repeat. But when the time comes, then you will know," was his answer. He was ever diligent in his attendance at church and was a regular communicant. He was further known to spend much time in private prayer. In 1826 when he was aged twenty-three he married, and his wife bore him six children. They all died young, and he met with an accident that injured both his knees and incapacitated him from being any longer a miner

One day as he was instant in prayer, the Grey Man stood at his side and bade him go to the town of Pottschappel, and inquire there for an aged woman named Hoffman, whom God purposed