Mittwochsmärchen: Der Mummelsee

Wanted to translate some tales of the Blackwood Forest for weeks and here is one. The words may be not very fairy-tale-alike, as I am second-language speaker and not too familiar with English fairy tales.... yet ;)

Deep in the Blackwood Forest, not far from Baden, there is a lake upon a hill. If you steep a bag filled with an even or uneven number of peas, stones or else in the water, it will change its contents from uneven to even number and obversely. If you throw stones into it, the sky will darken and a thunderstorm will arise. The little aquarian of the lake carry all the stones back to the shore again. Once some shepherds let their herd graze the grassland aside and one bull went to the lake but was driven away by the aquarian.

A peasant drove with his oxen and some logs across the frozen lake unharmed, but his following dog drowned because he fell trough the broken ice. A hunter saw a forest ghost once sitting there, playing with his treasures, his lap full of gold and tried to shoot him. The little woodwoose dived into the water and told him, if the hunter would have asked for it, he would have made him and his kin very rich, but so he had to stay poor.

One day a little man came to a farm nearby and begged for shelter. The farmer offered the sitting bench or the haystack. The dwarf wanted to sleep on the hemp and the farmer answered: "For all I care, you can sleep by the pond." The little man laid himself down there and came out the next morning with dry clothes, as if it were hay. The farmer was astonished, so the dwarf told him that his kind stayed overnight not very often in a few hundred years. As they spoke to each other, the farmer won the trust of the dwarf and so he told him that he lost his wife in the lake and asked for the right way to the lake.

On the way he told his new friend a lot more whimsical stories about his search in other lakes. When they arived at the lake he asked the farmer to wait a step nearby, awaiting his return or until he'd send a sign. When he waited several hours, fists full of blood and some shoes flew out of the water and the farmer supposed this was the sign. So he thought the lake must be damned and flew home.
A Duke of Württemberg had a raft build and driven across the lake, but it drowned. The raftsmen swam for their life. Today you can still see some pieces of the logs.

Original is here.