re so ready to extend it should be cautious
how they do so, especially in the case of a child, for a child is like a
sapling which needs light, and those who darken the sun that shines on it
sin against it, and hinder its growth. Instead of bewailing it, make it
glad; that is the comfort that befits it.

I felt I had discovered a great and important secret and I was eager to
make our sainted mother known to my brothers; but they had found her
already without any aid from their little sister. I told first one and
then the other all that stirred within me, and when I spoke to Herdegen,
the elder, I saw at once that it was nothing new to him. Kunz, the
younger, I found in the swing; he flew so high that I thought he would
fling himself out, and I cried to him to stop a minute; but, as he
clutched the rope tighter and pulled himself together to stand firm on
the board, he cried: "Leave me now, Margery; I want to go up, up; up to
Heaven--up to where mother is!"

That was enough for me; and from that hour we often spoke together of our
sainted mother, and Cousin Maud took care that we should likewise keep
our father in mind. She had his portrait--as she had had my
mother's--brought from the great dining-room, where it had hung, into the
large children's room where she slept with me. And this picture, too,
left its mark on my after-life; for when I had the measles, and Master
Paul Rieter, the town physician and our doctor, came to see me, he stayed
a long time, as though he could not bear to depart, standing in front of
the portrait; and when he turned to me again, his face was quite red with
sorrowful feeling--for he had been a favorite friend of my father, at
Padua--and he exclaimed: "What a fortunate child art thou, little
Margery!"

I must have looked at him puzzled enough, for no one had ever esteemed me
fortunate, unless it were Cousin Maud or the Waldstromers in the forest;
and Master Paul must have observed my amazement, for he went on. "Yea, a
happy child art thou; for so are all babes, maids or boys, who come into
the world after their father's death." As I gazed into his face, no less
astonished than before, he laid the gold knob of his cane against his
nose and said: "Remember, little simpleton, the good God would not be
what he is, would not be a man of honor--God forgive the words--if he did
not take a babe whom He had robbed of its father before it had seen the
light or had one proof of his love under His own