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.