Because of his acquaintance with a once-gifted composer whom we ourselves for years had dubbed a nonpareil genius, a skilled cabinetmaker from Maria Saal (a favorite place of pilgrimage in Carinthia) discovered literature and wrote poems and little comedies, which, however, according to those who got hold of them, were on the one hand totally unreadable and on the other totally unactable simply because no one understood them. The cabinetmaker drowned himself in the Längsee on his twenty-second birthday in despair at being so unappreciated. The newspaper that published a short obituary of the unappreciated young man emphasized above all else that he was unworldly.

At Their Mercy

AT THEIR MERCY

In order to save his wife’s life—she had a lung ailment—the man who went by the name of Ofner, the parish man-of-all-work and sexton, bought jointly with his wife, and as our doctor had advised him to, a small piece of wooded land in our neighborhood, high enough up to be out of the mists and in good clean air, and the two of them, after several years’ work—supported, of course, by the parish and their immediate neighbors—had built a small house on the property. When, however, the house was finished, Ofner fell ill, because building the house had really been too much for him, and died within a short time. His widow, for whom, after all, the house at the edge of the wood had been intended and who, even after her husband’s death, was visibly recovering from her lung ailment, had to get herself a dog, because, of course, now that she was alone, she was afraid. The dog barked at everyone who came within two hundred feet of her house, and as time went by, no one dared to go near it. For years the woman endured being on her own with the dog and without people, when suddenly, in a flash, she could no longer stand the situation and went out and bludgeoned the dog—who had served her so faithfully all the years—to death with a so-called Sappel, which loggers use for hauling logs, and threw herself on the mercy of her fellow human beings.

De Orio

DE ORIO