Unexpected Reunion
In Falun in Sweden a good fifty years ago and more, a young miner kissed his pretty fiancée and said to her: „On St. Lucia's Day our love will be blessed by the priest's hand. Then we shall be man and wife and will build ourselves a little nest of our own.“ „And peace and love shall dwell in it,“ said the lovely woman with a sweet smile, „for you are my One and All and without you I would rather be in the grave than in another place.“ But when the clergyman had read the banns in church for the second time before St. Lucia's Day: „If any of you can show just cause why these two may not lawfully be joined together in holy matrimony,“ Death spoke up. For when the youth walked past her house next day in his black miner's garb (the miner always wears his shroud), he knocked on her window once more and said good morning to her but never again good evening. He never returned from the mine, and on that same morning she hemmed a black kerchief for him with a red border for their wedding – in vain. But when he did not come, she laid it aside and wept for him and never forgot him. Meanwhile the city of Lisbon in Portugal was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Seven Years' War passed by, and the emperor Francis I died, and the Jesuit order was abolished, and Poland was partitioned, and the empress Maria Theresia died, and Struensee was executed, America became free, and the combined French and Spanish power could not capture Gibraltar. The Turks locked up General Stein in the Veterani Cave in Hungary, and the emperor Joseph died too. King Gustav of Sweden conquered Russian Finland, and the French Revolution and the long war began, and emperor Leopold II went to his grave too. Napoleon conquered Prussia and the English bombarded Copenhagen, and the farmers sowed and harvested. The miller milled and the blacksmiths hammered, and the miners dug for metal veins in their underground workshops. But when in the year 1809, shortly before or after Midsummer Day, the miners of Falun wanted to dig through an opening between two shafts, a good three hundred ells deep under the earth, they dug out of the rubble and vitriol water the corpse of a young completely saturated with iron sulphate but otherwise showing no sign of decomposition and completely unaltered, so that one could still fully recognize his facial features and his age, as if he had died only an hour ago and had fallen into a light sleep at his work. But when he was brought up into the light of day, no one cared to recognize the sleeping youth or to know anything about his accident (his father and mother, friends, and acquaintances had long been dead) until the former fiancée of the miner appeared, the one who had one day gone down into the shaft and never returned. Gray and shriveley she came on a crutch to the public square and recognized her betrothed; and more in joyful rapture than in pain she sank down upon the beloved corpse; and only after she had recovered from a long, severe emotional crisis she finally said: „He is my betrothed, for whom I have mourned for fifty long years and whom God is letting me see once more before my end. A week before our wedding he went down into the pit and never came up again.“ Then the spirits of all the bystanders were moved to sadness and tears when they saw the former bride in the form of withered, feeble age and the bridegroom still in his youthful beauty, and how after fifty years the flame of youthful love awakened again in her breast; but he did not open his mouth to smile or his eyes in recognition; and how she finally had him carried by the miners to her small room, as the only person who belonged to him and who had a claim on him, till his grave was prepared at the cemetery. The following day when his grave in the cemetery was prepared and the miners fetched him, she unlocked a little box, tied the black silken kerchief with the red border around his neck, and accompanied him in her Sunday dress as if it were her wedding day and not the day of his burial. For when he was laid in his grave in the cemetery, she said: „Now sleep well for another day or ten in your cool wedding bed and don't let time hang heavy on your hands. I have only a little more left to do and will come soon, and soon it will be day again.“ - „What the earth has given back once, it will not keep for a second time,“ she said, as she went away and looked back once more.
(from: Johann Peter Hebel „Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes“)