dance now made her soul overflow
with joyful thoughts. It is the time in which the earth gives a feast to
all her children, and joyous and changing scenes were represented by the
waysides. Here the corn-field raised to heaven its golden sheaves, and
the harvesters sang; there, around the purple berries of the
service-tree, circled beautiful flocks of the twittering silktails;
round the solitary huts, the flowering potato-fields told that the fruit
was ripe, and merry little barefooted children sprang into the wood to
gather bilberries. Petrea thanked heaven in her heart for all the
innocent joys of earth. She thought of her home, of her parents, of her
sisters, of Sara, who would soon again be one of their circle, and of
how she (Petrea) would cherish her, and care for her, and reconcile her
to life and to happiness. In the blessed, beautiful morning hour, all
thoughts clothed themselves in light. Petrea felt quite happy, and the
joke which she thought of playing on her friend the Assessor with the
stolen piece of paper, contributed not a little to screw up her life's
spirit to greater liveliness. "From the fulness of the heart the mouth
speaketh," and Petrea involuntarily influenced her travelling companion
so far that they both amused themselves with bombarding little children
on the waysides with apples and pears, whereby they were not at all
terrified.

They had now taken the same road upon which Sara had travelled, and in
the first inn at which they stopped, their hopes were strengthened; for
Sara had been there, and had taken thence a horse to the next
public-house. All was on the way towards home. So continued it also at
the three following stations; but at the fifth, they suddenly lost all
traces of her. No one there had seen a traveller answering to her
description, nor was her name to be found in the Travellers' Day-book.
No! a great uneasiness for Petrea. After some deliberation, she and the
Assessor determined to return to the public-house whence they were just
come, in order to discover clearly in what direction Sara had gone
thence.

In the mean time the evening had come on, and the sun was descending as
our friends were passing through one of the gloomiest woods in Sweden,
and one in such ill-report that not long ago a writer speaking of it,
said, "The forest shrouds memories as awful as itself, and monuments of
murder stand by the wayside. Probably the mantle of the mountains falls
not now in such thic