of it all, Irmgard, when I get cross and scold.
You'll help me, won't you? to become like my mother, so that, some day,
my children will think of me as I do of her. Ah! if one were only
always as good as one can be. Yes, she was right when she used to say:
'Wishing in the one hand and blowing into the other, amount to about
the same thing.'"

*

I shall now return to my work. At such times, there is hardship and yet
comfort in labor. Hansei and Walpurga are obliged to work. They cannot
afford to give themselves up to grief, for too much depends on them. Be
it with king or beggar, poet or peasant, the key-note of the highest
emotions is always the same.

Walpurga's lament was pitched in the same key as that of Lear for
Cordelia, and yet how different. To a father who loses his child, the
future is dead. To a child losing a parent, the past is dead. Ah! how
weak is language.

*

I was quite alarmed by something that Hansei said to-day. Has doubt
entered even these simple hearts? And they do their duty in this world
without a firm belief in a future state.

In his funeral sermon, the preacher had said: "Behold the trees! A few
weeks ago, they were dead. But with the spring, they return to life."
"The pastor oughtn't to have said that," remarked Hansei; "not that
way, at any rate. He might convert children by that, but not us. What
does he mean by talking about trees in that fashion? The trees that
still have life in them will get new leaves in the spring, but the dead
ones won't; they'll be cut down and others will be planted in their
place."

*

We all of us have a strange feeling of loneliness--a feeling that
something is missing. Uncle Peter is the most inconsolable of all.

"Now I must wander about the world alone; I haven't brother or sister
left. She was the pride of our family," he repeats again and again.

Heretofore, he always slept in the garret, with the servants; but now
Hansei has placed the old pensioner's room at his disposal. He is quite
proud of it, but often complains, saying: "Why did I have to wait so
long for all this? How stupid it was of my sister and me. We might have
moved in there. Could we have found a prettier place? Oh, how nicely we
would have lived there, and you could have gone along with us. Oh, how
stupid old age is. We don't see the good nests till the trees are bare
and