Dami would take presents of food from anybody who offered them, and was therefore always eating, while Amrie was satisfied with very little, and accustomed herself to be very moderate in every thing. Even the rudest and wildest boy feared Amrie without knowing why; while Dami ran from the youngest. In the school, Dami was always uneasy, moving his hands and his feet, and the corners of his book were dog’s-eared. Amrie, on the contrary, was always neat, active, and diligent. She wept often in the school, not because she was punished, for that was very rare, but because Dami often received correction.
Amrie could please her brother best when she told him riddles. Both children sat often near the house of their rich guardian; sometimes by the wagon, sometimes by the oven at the back of the house, where they warmed themselves, especially in the autumn. And Amrie asked, “What is the best thing about the oven?”
“You know that I can’t guess,” said Dami, complainingly.
“Then I will tell you. The best of the oven is, that it does not eat the bread that is put into its mouth;” and, pointing to the wagon before the house, she said, “What is nothing but holes, and yet holds fast?” Without waiting for the answer, she said, “That is a chain.”
“Now you have given me two riddles?” said Dami. And Amrie answered, “Yes, but you give them up. See, there come the sheep; now, I know another.”
“No,” cried Dami. “No! I can’t hold three; I have enough with two.”
“No, you must hear this, else I take the others back;” and Dami repeated anxiously to himself, “chain,” “self-eating,” while Amrie asked, “Upon which side have the sheep the most wool?”
“Baa, baa! upon the outside,” she added, gayly singing, while Dami sprang away to tell the riddles to his comrades. When he reached them, he had forgotten all but the chain, and Rodel’s eldest boy, whom he did not ask, immediately cried out the solution. Then Dami came weeping back to his sister.
The little Amrie’s knowledge of riddles could not long remain concealed from the village; and even the rich, serious farmers, who scarcely spoke with any one, especially not with a poor child, often stopped from their work, and asked the little Amrie to give them a riddle. That she knew a great number which she might have heard from Mariann, was easy to believe, but that she could always answer new ones, excited universal wonder. She could not cross the street or the field without being stopped. She made it a rule that she would give no man the solution of her riddles, and they were ashamed at once to give them up. She knew how to turn from them, so that they were banished, as it were. Yet never in a village was a poor child so much respected as the little Amrie. But as she grew to womanhood, she excited less attention; for men observe the blossom and the fruit with a sympathizing eye, but not the long ripening process from one stage to the other. Before Amrie left school, destiny gave her a riddle to guess whose solution was very difficult.
The children had an uncle who lived about seven hours’ journey from Holdenbrunn, a wood-hewer in Fluorn. They had seen him once, at the funeral of their parents; he walked behind the Mayor, who led the children by the hand. Since then the children had often dreamed of their uncle in Fluorn. They were often told that he looked like their father, and since they had given up the hope that father and mother would come back again, they were more curious to see their uncle. But as years passed, and they every year strewed the mountain-ash berries on their graves, and they had learned to read the names of their parents upon the same dark cross, they forgot the uncle in Fluorn. In all these years they had heard nothing of him. Both children were called one day into the house of their guardian. There sat a man large and tall, with a brown complexion.