510 ASCH
time, and whether she might not come any night to one's bedside, and whine in a dead voice :
"Give me back my hair, give me back my hair !"
A frost seized the girl to the marrow, she shivered and shook.
Then she heard the squeak of scissors over her head, tore herself out of her mother's arms, made one snatch at the scissors, flung them across the room, and said in a scarcely human voice:
"My own hair ! May God Himself punish me !"
That day the bridegroom's mother took herself off home again, together with the sweet-cakes and the geese which she had brought for the wedding breakfast for her own guests. She wanted to take the bridegroom as well, but the bride's mother said: "I will not give him back to you ! He belongs to me already !"
The following Sabbath they led the bride in proces- sion to the Shool wearing her own hair in the face of all the town, covered only by a large hood.
But may all the names she was called by the way find their only echo in some uninhabited wilderness.
A summer evening, a few weeks after the wedding: The young man had just returned from the Stiibel, and went to his room. The wife was already asleep, and the soft light of the lamp fell on her pale face, showing here and there among the wealth of silky- black hair that bathed it. Her slender arms were flung round her head, as though she feared that someone might come by night to shear them off while she slept. He had come home excited and irritable: this was the fourth week of his married life, and they had not yet
