ly the whole ball separated, and almost the whole crowd ran in the
same direction.

Only two boys remained on the playground and looked at each other, quite
perplexed. The one was stout little Ritz, who long since had forgotten
his great trouble and had listened intently to the exciting, although
incomprehensible story. The other was his brother Edi, a slender, tall
fellow with a high forehead and serious grey eyes beneath. He was hardly
two years older than his brother; but for his not quite nine years, he
was tall, and appeared much older than the seven-year-old Ritz.

"We must run home quickly and ask whether we too may go; we must see
that, Ritz, so hurry up!" With these words Edi pulled his brother along,
and soon they turned round the corner and also disappeared.

Behind the schoolhouse, near the hawthorn hedge, stood the last of the
crowd in animated conversation. It was Sally, the ten-year-old sister of
the two boys, with her friend Kaetheli, who with great excitement seemed
to describe an occurrence.

"But Kaetheli, I do not know the beginning," said Sally. "Just you begin
at the beginning, from where you saw everything with your own eyes, will
you?"

"Very well, I will, but this time you must pay close attention," said
Kaetheli. "You know that the old blind straw-plaiter lived with the
little girl Meili at old Marianne's? Well, Meili went to school at Lower
Wood. Two weeks ago her father died and Meili had to go to Lower Wood to
her uncle. Then Marianne cleaned the bedroom and the sitting-room
terribly clean, opened all the windows, and afterwards closed them all
again and put on the shutters. She herself lives in the little room
above. But this morning everything was open, and yet Marianne had said
nothing about it to anyone and all people in Middle Lot were surprised
at that. At half-past eleven, just when we were coming out of school, we
saw a wagon coming up the hill from Lower Wood, and the horse could
hardly pull the load, for there was a large piano on the wagon, a bed,
and lots of other things, a table and a little box, and I think that was
all. Now the wagon stopped at old Marianne's cottage, and all at once
there came out of the cottage old Marianne and a woman, who was quite
white in the face, and behind them came a little boy, and no one had
seen them come up. Then four men of Middle Lot wanted to carry the piano
into the cottage but it would not go through the door because the door
was too na