The strawberry smell gets all over the
house."

Phoebe turned alertly and closed the door. Then she soliloquized, "I
don't see why there has to be doors on the inside of houses. I like to
smell the good things all over the house, but then it's Aunt Maria's
boss, not me."

Maria Metz shook her head as she returned to her berries. "If it don't
beat all and if I won't have my hands full yet with that girl 'fore
she's growed up! That stubborn she is, like her pop--ach, like all of us
Metz's, I guess. Anyhow, it ain't easy raising somebody else's child. If
only her mom would have lived, and so young she was to die, too."

Her thoughts went back to the time when her brother Jacob brought to the
old Metz farmhouse his gentle, sweet-faced bride. Then the joint
persuasions of Jacob and his wife induced Maria Metz to continue her
residence in the old homestead. She relieved the bride of all the brunt
of manual labor of the farm and in her capable way proved a worthy
sister to the new mistress of the old Metz place. When, several years
later, the gentle wife died and left Jacob the legacy of a helpless
babe, it was Maria Metz who took up the task of mothering the motherless
child. If she bungled at times in the performance of the mother's
unfinished task it was not from lack of love, for she loved the fair
little Phoebe with a passion that was almost abnormal, a passion which
burned the more fiercely because there was seldom any outlet in
demonstrative affection.

As soon as the child was old enough Aunt Maria began to teach her the
doctrines of the plain church and to warn her against the evils of
vanity, frivolity and all forms of worldliness.

Maria Metz was richly endowed with that admirable love of industry which
is characteristic of the Pennsylvania Dutch. In accordance with her
acceptance of the command, "Six days shalt thou labor," she swept,
scrubbed, and toiled from early morning to evening with Herculean
persistence. The farmhouse was spotless from cellar to attic, the wooden
walks and porches scrubbed clean and smooth. Flower beds, vegetable
gardens and lawns were kept neat and without weeds. Aunt Maria was, as
she expressed it, "not afraid of work." Naturally she considered it her
duty to teach little Phoebe to be industrious, to sew neatly, to help
with light tasks about the house and gardens.

Like many other good foster-mothers Maria Metz tried conscientiously to
care for the child's spiritual and physical