wander in such a holiday fashion with the busy, hard-working woman.
"Look, look, mother!" she kept crying at every moment: "There comes
something! There's something! Listen--a woodpecker! a deer!"

The arms of the sturdy ten-year-old quivered with joy. Frau Rauchfuss
felt her child's delight in life. It went keenly to her heart, and she
pressed the little girl closely to her. "Ah, if God would only grant,
dear, that everything might go on just as it is!"

They came to the other side of the wood which lies like a broad band
across the slope of the Ettersberg, where there was a very old wayside
shrine without a saint. The saints had been too long exposed to the
weather and to the onslaughts of Protestantism, and were worn away,
broken, and vanished. Nothing was to be seen but a dilapidated low
wall, on which the sorrowful Mother of God had once stood. Fran
Rauchfuss sat down wearily on it and lifted her child to her lap.
Together they looked out silently over the world which is closed to
the people of Weimar, the world that lies behind the Ettersberg, a
sunshiny, grain-bearing landscape, over which lay the last warm,
lingering rays of the evening sun.

"What's the matter, mother? You're so quiet!"

"This time yesterday I had to carry you to bed because you had drunk
too much." The child hid her face in her mother's neck. "Other
children," she went on calmly, "while they are young, have a mother to
watch over them. The time will come when you will have none. Other
children have a father who helps them and advises them. That your
father cannot do. Presently you will be quite alone, and will have to
help yourself in every difficulty, and at the same time to look after
your father and see that nothing happens to him."

The child raised her head and looked at her mother with astonishment.
"You will be all alone; you must learn to think now what is right and
wrong." Tears sprang to the eyes of the frightened child. The mother's
eyes were as moist as the little girl's; and they gazed at each other
with sad, uncertain faces. Frau Rauchfuss let her head fall on the
soft, yielding shoulder of her child, and a mighty sob tore itself
loose from her laden heart. The loving fair-haired child stroked her
mother's face and pressed more closely to her.

"I am ill, my darling--I cannot live very much longer; and I'm so
worried I don't know what to do, because I must leave you alone with
your father. No one will look after you."