seven years old. Only a quarter of a mile from the spot on which
Carl Werner had fixed his residence lived a brother German, Franz
Rainer. Franz was a widower, with one child, a son, named Ernest. He was
a hard, stern man, and the first smiles which had lighted the existence
of the young Ernest were caught from the sprightly Meeta and her
kind-hearted mother. The children became playfellows and friends. It was
a wild country in which they lived. A very short walk from their own
doors brought them into a forest which seemed to their young
imaginations endless; where gigantic trees interlaced their branches,
and with their green foliage shut out the sun in summer, or in winter
reflected it in dazzling brightness, and a thousand gorgeous colors,
from the icicles which cased their leafless branches and pendent twigs.
There was not a footpath, a sunny hill or flowery dell, for miles around
their homes, which had not been trodden together by Meeta Werner and
Ernest Rainer before their acquaintance was a year old. Now they would
come home laden with wood-flowers, and now they might be seen treading
wearily back from some distant spot, with baskets filled with
blackberries, or with the dark-blue whortleberries. There were no
schools in the neighborhood, but they had been taught by their fathers
to read and write their own language, and Ernest afterwards acquired
some knowledge of English from the good pastor who had accompanied the
emigrants from Germany, and who acted as their interpreter when they
required one. Having access to few books, they seemed likely to grow up
with little more learning than might be gathered from their own
observation of the world around them; but when Ernest was eighteen and
Meeta fifteen years of age, circumstances occurred which gave an
entirely new coloring to their lives.

Franz Rainer had not always been so stern and hard as he now seemed. He
had married imprudently, in the world's acceptation of that term; that
is, he had made a portionless but lovely girl his wife, and in doing so
had incurred his father's lasting displeasure. He had been banished from
a home of plenty with a small sum, "to keep him from starving," he was
told. With that sum and a young delicate wife he sailed for America, and
found a home for himself and his boy, and a grave for his wife, in the
forests of Pennsylvania. Too proud to seek a reconciliation with those
who had cast him off, he had held no communication with his ow