began anew: 'After they had buried mother, they sent me into
the country among the mountains, for they said it was not the duty
of the city to care for me, but that of the village parish, where my
parents were born. So I was taken there. The six nuts that I had saved
I took with me to play with. This I most enjoyed doing in the spring,
alone on the little strip of grass behind the Poor-house, in which I was
the only child. Besides me there were but three old women 'being fed to
death,' as the peasants used to say. Two of my companions were blind,
and the third was dull-witted and gazed ever straight before her. Not
one of them noticed anything that happened around them, but my heart
used to grow light when everything about me budded, and sprouted, and
burst into bloom. My body was always aching but my pains could not
lessen my enjoyment of the spring. Wherever I looked, men were sowing
and planting. It was the first time that I had ever seen it, and the
wish came over me to confide something to the good earth that would take
root, and sprout, and grow green and high for me.

"'So I stuck four of my nuts into the ground. I put them as far apart in
the small space as I could, so that if big trees came from my seeds they
might not stand in one another's way, but might all enjoy the air and
the sunshine that I was so thankful for. I saw my seeds sprout, but what
became of them afterwards I did not live to see. Two years after I sowed
them a famine fell upon us. The poor weavers who lived in the mountain
village had all they could do to nourish wife and child. There was
little left for the Poor-house. As I was already ill I could not stand
the misery, and I was the first to die of the dreadful fever caused by
hunger. Only one of the blind women, and the dull-witted one followed
the sack in which I was buried--for who would have paid for a coffin?
The last two nuts I divided with the old women. Each one of us had a
half, and how gladly we ate the little morsel, for even a taste of any
dainty seemed good to us, after we had lived on nothing but bread and
potatoes. From here I watched the other nuts grow to be trees. All four
had straight stems and thick crowns. Under one of them that stood near a
spring, which is now called the Fresh Spring, an old carpenter who came
to the Poor-house built a bench.'

"Here another angel interrupted the little narrator with the question:
'Do you mean the nut-tree in Dorbstadt?' and, receiving