ut the dear mistress was my
godmother, and my father had been pastor of a village, and had taught me
some things before he died.

We are now but a few days to Christmas, when one night the old man comes
in with a letter for the dear mistress, at which she first sobs and
turns white, and then laughs and turns red. The dear master is wounded,
but is at the frontier, whither he had been sent, staying till he is
strong enough to come home; "but there," he writes, "I have had the luck
to fall into the hands of a good nurse, an old acquaintance, who will
bring me home."

"Ah! ha! that he could already come home," sighs the mistress.
"Loisl--Heinrich, thy dear father may yet be here before the tree is
lighted; and brings with him a nurse--who can she be, think'st thou,
Lisba?"

"I know not, unless it be one of the deaconesses who go to the
hospitals; but is it not possible, dear lady, that it is a comrade, a
surgeon of the army, an ambulance officer?"

"It is Hofer," cried Bertha, who was standing at the door of the big
kitchen, where we were listening to such parts of the letter as the
mistress pleased to read to us.

"Hofer! the lass has gone silly!" cries the Herr postmaster. "Hofer and
Franz are fighting with the army of the Loire, as the French call it,
and are who knows where. I have a letter here that reached me
yesterday, written some days ago, where Franz says--let me read it:"

(Here the old man pulls on his horn spectacles and opens a thin sheet of
paper.)

"Franz says:--'We are in quarters here at a tavern, but it has few
customers, and we are obliged to seek for what we need. It is, in fact,
almost an empty house, dismantled, half burnt, and with a good many shot
holes. Still we keep up our spirits. We have begun to hold our Christmas
already, for we have a long table and a few chairs, and somebody last
night found a great milk-pan in the half-ruined dairy of the inn, and,
having on hand a few bottles of very good red wine, we made a fine bowl
of _grog-au-vin_, with the aid of a wood fire and an old saucepan. In
came Hofer and gave us a toast and a song, and then they called on me,
and I gave them the old _Lied_, that thou hast so often played, and for
a toast, 'Fifine.' If Fifine had been there she would have been lying on
my shoulder, but since I rescued her from the teasing of a big
drum-major she has grown shy and doesn't like company; and though she
would soon be a pet with most of our men, keeps her