e another only to say a welcome and a good-bye," said Roland.

"Come into the garden with me," replied Lilian.

CHAPTER III.

AN HOUR IN PARADISE.

The children walked about the garden and gathered flowers, and they
seemed to be in fairy land. They went first into the vegetable garden,
where dwarf pear-trees were set out at regular intervals, and Lilian,
thinking that she must explain everything to the visitor, in a matronly
manner, said:--

"Yes, yes, there's no rose-bush, no little tree, which my aunt has not
budded, and she hates all vermin. Now just think what aunt reckons as
vermin! But you musn't laugh at her for it."

"What? Tell me."

"She considers the birds vermin, too. Oh, you laugh exactly like my
brother Hermann. Laugh once more! Yes, he laughs exactly so. But my
brother has been in business for three years. Come, we'll look for some
flowers now."

They went into the flower garden and gathered many different kinds of
flowers, but Lilian threw a large bunch of them into the brook, and
pleased herself with thinking how the flowers would float down to the
Rhine, and from the Rhine to the sea, and who knows but they would go
straight to New York, even before she got there herself!

"I shall come to America, too, to see you," Roland all at once
exclaimed.

"Give me your hand that you will."

For the first time, the children took each other by the hand.

A shot was heard behind them. Roland trembled.

"Just be quiet. Are you really frightened?" Lilian said, soothingly.
"It's aunt; she's only frightening away the sparrows; she fires every
time she comes into the orchard. A pistol is always lying upon the
table yonder."

Roland now saw Frau Weidmann putting the discharged pistol down on the
table.

"We'll be perfectly quiet, so that she won't hear us," he said to
Lilian.

They sat down on the margin of the brook, and Lilian whispered:--

"The mignonettes I'll keep, they smell so sweet, even after they're
wilted."

"Yes," Roland rejoined, "give me a mignonette too, and as often as we
smell them, we will think of each other. The field-guard Claus, told me
once--he's a real bee-father--that the mignonette yields the most
honey."

Of all his knowledge, nothing else now occurred to him.

"You are very clever!" exclaimed the child. "Now tell me, do you think,
too, that the bees smell the flowers as we do, and that the flowers put