Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 01.djvu/102

86 receiver of their stolen goods, who was the wife of the great ventriloquist.

This poor child, who was buried before she was born, was everywhere called the Death-Child. Ah! you cannot know how much misery I had even as a little girl, when people called me by this name. While the great ventriloquist was alive, and when he was discontented with me—as often happened—he always cried: "Cursed Death-Child, I wish I had never taken you from the grave." As he was of great skill in his calling, he could so modulate his voice as to make any one think that it came from the ground, and so he would make me believe that it was the voice of my dead mother who related her story. He knew the terrible tale well enough, for he had once been a servant of the Count my father. It was his greatest pleasure to torture me with the awful terror which I, a mere infant, felt at hearing this. The words which came in spectral tones from the ground told things so dreadful that I could not