oing to tell you.

The thing that happened came just when things were beginning to look
a little brighter for us. For some time past my head had been less
troublesome, and I had got to work on a new harrow--steel again; it
never lets one rest--and you know what endless possibilities a man sees
in a thing like that. Merle was working with fresh courage. What do you
think of a wife like that? taking up the cross of her own free will, to
go on sharing the life of a ruined man? I hope you may meet a woman of
her sort one day. True, her hair is growing grey, and her face lined.
Her figure is not so straight as once it was; her hands are red and
broken. And yet all this has a soul of its own, a beauty of its own,
in my eyes, because I know that each wrinkle is a mark left by the time
when some new trouble came upon us, and found us together. Then one day
she smiles, and her smile has grown strained and full of sadness, but
again it brings back to me times when both heaven and earth breathed
cold upon us and we drew closer to each other for warmth. Our happiness
and our sufferings have moulded her into what she now is. The world may
think perhaps that she is growing old; to me she is only more beautiful
than before.

And now I am coming to what I was going to tell you. You will understand
that it was not easy to send away the two children, and it doesn't make
things better to get letters from them constantly begging us to let them
come home again. But we had still one little girl left, little Asta, who
was just five. I wish you could have seen her. If you were a father and
your tortured nerves had often made you harsh and unreasonable with
the two elder ones, you would try--would you not?--to make it up in
loving-kindness to the one that was left. Asta--isn't it pretty? Imagine
a sunburnt little being with black hair, and her mother's beautiful
eyebrows, always busy with her dolls, or fetching in wood, or baking
little cakes of her own for father when mother's baking bread for us
all, chattering to the birds on the roof, or singing now and then, just
because some stray note of music has come into her head. When mother is
busy scrubbing the floor, little Asta must needs get hold of a wet rag
behind her back and slop away at a chair, until she has got herself in a
terrible mess, and then she gets smacked, and screams for a moment, but
soon runs out and sings herself happy again. When you're at work in
the smithy, there comes a