ove to hear the sound of human voices.

The stories they tell each other seem simple, but, after all, none
better are told in the _salon_.

*

Why did I not live out my life in purity? I was intended for a noble
and beautiful existence.

*

My white foal is running about, while I sit here modeling it. The power
of giving permanent shape to impressions received by the eye is the
prerogative of man alone. We have words for everything about us and can
imitate all objects, and, over and above that, we have music and pure
thought. What rich stores of knowledge and delight are at man's
disposal.

*

We have passed three sad, sorrowful days. The grandmother was ill. The
whole household was in alarm. Hansei feared the worst and did not
venture to leave the farm. It was a comfort to me to find that my
nursing did the grandmother so much good.

*

Hansei, proud as he is of being a great farmer, was so anxious to do
something for the mother, that he chopped the wood with which to make a
fire in her room, and carried it in, himself.

*

He always told the doctor to spare no expense. Nothing was too dear, or
too good for the grandmother.

The doctor explained the grandmother's illness to me, just as if I were
a physician.

She often sent Uncle Peter out into the woods to me. It was still raw
out there, and we soon returned.

The grandmother is well again, and is sitting in the spring sunshine.

"Yes, one must have been out of the world, to be grateful for coming
back again," said she. "One who doesn't get away doesn't know what it
is to come back." She had much to tell me about the deaths of her five
children. "This one would have been so old, and this one so old," she
kept on saying. In imagination, they had grown up with her. Then she
told me of her husband's death: how he had been dragged into the lake
by the driftwood, and drowned; and how Hansei had remained with them
afterward. "He was a strange man," she always said of her husband, "but
good-hearted."

During his sister's illness, the little pitchman was in great despair.

"She was the pride of our family," he kept on saying, as if she were
already dead. But now he is the happiest of us all, and when the
grandmother sat on my bench under the maple tree, for the first time,
he said: