she took bites out of the best to see if they were ripe!
She has no pleasure but in gobbling up the best of everything."

Bremer himself could not help admitting that there was a very heathenish
spirit in her when he heard his wife crying from morning till night,
"Myrtle, Myrtle! where are you now? Ah, naughty, bad girl! she has run
away into the woods again to gather blackberries." But still he laughed
to himself, and pitied poor Catherine, whom he compared to a hen with a
brood of ducklings.

Every year after harvest-time Fritz and Myrtle spent whole days far away
from the farm, pasturing the cattle, singing, and whistling, and baking
potatoes under the ashes, and coming down the rocky hill in the evening
blowing the shepherd's horn.

These were some of Myrtle's happiest days. Seated before the burning
hemp-stalks, with her pretty brown face between her hands, she lost
herself in endless reveries.

The long strings of wild ducks and geese which traverse, about the end of
autumn, the boundless heavens spread from the mountains on the east to
the western hills, seemed to have a depressing effect upon her mind. She
used to follow them with longing eyes, straining them as if to overtake
the wild birds in the immeasurable distance; and suddenly she would rise,
spread out her arms, and cry--

"I must go! I must go! I can't stay!"

Then she would weep with her head bowed down, and Fritz, seeing her in
tears, would cry too, asking--

"Why do you cry, Myrtle? Has anybody hurt you? Is it any of the boys in
the village?--Kasper, Wilhelm, Heinrich? Only tell me, and I will knock
him down at once! Do tell!"

"No; it is not that."

"Well, why are you crying?"

"I don't know."

"Do you want to run as far as the Falberg?"

"No; that is not far enough."

"Where do you want to go?"

"Down there! down there! ever so far! where the birds are going."

This made Fritz open his eyes and his mouth very wide.

One day in September, when they were idling along by the woods, about
noon, the heat was so great and the air so still that the smoke of their
little fire, instead of rising straight into the air, fell like water and
crept among the briars. The grasshopper had ceased its dull monotonous
chirp, not the buzzing of a fly was to be heard, nor the warbling of a
bird. The oxen and the cows, with sleepy eyes half-closed, their knees
bent under them, were resting together under a spreading oak in the
meadow, now and then lo