r; the child
seemed to her so strangely changed.

"Frederick, how's your uncle?" The boy muttered a few unintelligible
words and leaned close against the chimney.

"Frederick, have you forgotten how to talk? Boy, open your mouth! Don't
you know I do not hear well with my right ear?" The child raised his
voice and began to stammer so that Margaret failed to understand
anything.

"What are you saying? Greeting from Master Semmler? Away again? Where?
The cows are at home already. You bad boy, I can't understand you. Wait,
I'll have to see if you have no tongue in your mouth!" She made a few
angry steps forward. The child looked up to her with the pitiful
expression of a poor, half-grown dog that is learning to sit up on his
hind legs. In his fear he began to stamp his feet and rub his back
against the chimney.

Margaret stood still; her glances became anxious. The boy looked as
though he had shrunk together. His clothes were not the same either; no,
that was not her child! And. yet--"Frederick, Frederick!" she cried.

A closet door in the bedroom slammed and the real Frederick came out,
with a so-called clog-violin in one hand, that is, a wooden shoe strung
with three or four resined strings, and in his other hand a bow, quite
befitting the instrument. Then he went right up to his sorry double,
with an attitude of conscious dignity and independence on his part,
which at that moment revealed distinctly the difference between the two
boys who otherwise resembled each other so remarkably.

"Here, John!" he said, and handed him the work of art with a patronizing
air; "here is the violin that I promised you. My play-days are over; now
I must earn money."

John cast another timid glance at Margaret, slowly stretched out his
hand until he had tightly grasped the present, and then hid it
stealthily under the flaps of his shabby coat.

Margaret stood perfectly still and let the children do as they liked.
Her thoughts had taken another, very serious, turn, and she looked
restlessly from one to the other. The strange boy had again bent over
the coals with an expression of momentary comfort which bordered on
simple-mindedness, while Frederick's features showed the alternating
play of a sympathy evidently more selfish than good-humored, and his
eyes, in almost glassy clearness, for the first time distinctly showed
the expression of that unrestrained ambition and tendency to swagger
which afterwards revealed itself as so stron