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Do you remember with what an endless number of monotonous jokes the goldfinches that fairly overran the Heuscheuer Mountains used to furnish us? When we approached a bare bush or tree, it would suddenly sway to and fro and scatter gold leaves. We interpreted that as meaning mountains of gold.
The little town in which Frederick had practised was called Plassenberg an der Heuscheuer, that is, Plassenberg by the Heuscheuer Mountains, a range in the county of Glatz where excellent sandstone is quarried. The people of the district loved Frederick both as a man and a physician.
When Frederick stepped from the smoking-room, he saw the corpse lying in the coffin. It was not Zickelmann, the stoker, but Angèle, his suffering, neglected wife, in one of her hysterical attacks in which she lay in a trance. And it was not at the entrance to the smoking-room, but in Plassenberg in the Heuscheuer, in front of his comfortable house.
In the midst of his annoyance Frederick heard a voice calling his name. He looked up and scarcely trusted his eyes on seeing a large fellow in whom he thought he recognised a peasant from the Heuscheuer Mountains, a peasant with an evil reputation for drunkenness and all sorts of misdeeds. "Wilke, is that you?" "Yes, Doctor, I'm Wilke."
He was dressed in a shabby cap and dressing-gown belonging to a confectioner long dead, whom he had known when a boy. Mysterious as it all was, there was yet something natural in this meeting with his friend. The little shop was alive with goldfinches. "They are the goldfinches," Rasmussen explained, "that settled in the Heuscheuer Mountains last winter, you know, and were fatal to me."
"The people in the Heuscheuer," he said, "are mean and ungrateful." Shy and distrustful at home, even toward Frederick, who had treated him for his last knife wound on his neck, his manner here, with the other passengers crossing the great waters, was frank and trustful. He was like a well-behaved child chattering freely.
At regular intervals the stern would rise out of the water, carrying with it the screw, which would then buzz in the air, and Frederick would hear Wilke from the Heuscheuer saying: "Doctor, if only the screw doesn't snap." Finally, all the machinery of the vessel seemed to be turning in his brain.
Frederick protested, and disputed loudly with the third mate, who in the meantime had entered the boat and was grasping the tiller. He could not make up his mind to desert Wilke of the Heuscheuer, who had so courageously followed him below deck and had not yet reappeared. But now he saw him, literally sliding from the companionway entrance to the railing. "Wilke! Wilke!" he shouted.
I left the sanatorium in the Harz and returned to my parents' home a lost man. That cursed winter in the Heuscheuer Mountains! After a stay in tropical countries, I should not have thrown myself into the fangs of such a winter. Of course, the worst thing was my predecessor's fur coat. To my predecessor's fur coat I owe my sweet fate. May the devil in hell take special delight in burning it.
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