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After her came the makers of the peplus, and Hermione rejoined her husband. “Let us not stay to the public feast,” was her wish; “let these hucksters and charcoal-burners who live on beans and porridge scramble for a bit of burned meat, but we return to Colonus.” “Good then,” answered Glaucon, “and these friends of course go with us.” Cimon assented readily.
It seems they were quite a band, living anywhere in the woods, in old charcoal-burners' huts or under the trees, never staying two nights in the same place. There are women, and children, and babies, who appear and disappear, in the most extraordinary manner. Many of them have been condemned, and have had two weeks or a month of prison.
Then a little knot of charcoal-burners came down the path, and naturally halted to speak to Buldeo, whose fame as a hunter reached for at least twenty miles round. They all sat down and smoked, and Bagheera and the others came up and watched while Buldeo began to tell the story of Mowgli, the Devil-child, from one end to another, with additions and inventions.
We stopped once to warm at the pits of some negro charcoal-burners, and before day dawned had traveled sixteen miles. We found a sheltered nook on the side of the mountain open to the sun, where we made a bed of dry leaves and remained for the day.
Till then, and for a long time afterwards, the principal source of fuel consisted of vast forests, amidst which the charcoal-burners, or "colliers" as they were even then called, lived out their lonely existence in preparing charcoal and hewing wood, for the fires of the baronial halls and stately castles then swarming throughout the land.
This resolve I communicated to the Baron von Schrankenheim, who, after vain attempts to dissuade me from my purpose, spoke to me of this wilderness, his property, where I could do real good among the rough wood-cutters, poachers, shepherds and charcoal-burners, who, cut off from the rest of the world, eked out their existence without priest or doctor or schoolmaster.
These Charcoal-burners hated us Blacks, first, because in our sable disguise we rather imitated their own Beastly appearance for the varlets never washed from Candlemas to Shrovetide; next, because we were Gentlemen; and lastly, because we would not suffer them to catch Deer for themselves in pitfalls and springes.
One wretched hovel succeeded another. Yonder before a door, Wilhelm the idiot, on whom the city boys played their pranks, smiled into vacancy just as foolishly as he had done twenty years ago, here lodged Kathrin, with the big goitre, who swept the gutters; in the three grey huts, from which hung numerous articles of ragged clothing, lived two families of charcoal-burners, and Caspar, the juggler, a strange man, whom as a boy he had seen in the pillory, with his deformed daughters, who in winter washed laces and in summer went with him to the fairs.
Tell them a vast sum has been collected, and that their cartloads will be bought entire the moment they enter the city. There will be no waiting for their money. Prompt payment, and everything eatable purchased immediately. Greusel, I put on you the hardest task. Penetrate into the forest south of the Main, and tell the charcoal-burners and woodmen to bring in material for kitchen fires.
"And would your life," he exclaimed, "have been a whit less bare had you passed it in your ancestral keep among those windy hills, in the company of swineherds and charcoal-burners, with a milk-maid for your mistress and the village priest for your partner at picquet?" "Perhaps not," the other agreed.
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