The little Barefoot

by Berthold Auerbach

This opinion, that she was not on the lowest step of the ladder of honor, but that there was something upon which she could step down, made Amrie suddenly pause. For herself she could gain nothing more at present, but she would no longer suffer Dami to herd the geese with her. He was a man, and he should be one. It might injure him if it could afterwards be said that he had formerly kept the geese. But with all her zeal she could not make it clear to him. He was angry with her. It is always so. At the point where the understanding ceases, there begins an inward obstinacy; inward imbecility passes into outward injustice, and sometimes into injurious action.

Amrie rejoiced, that Dami could be for so many days angry with her; she hoped he would learn to stand up against others and assert his own will.

Dami also received an office. He was apprenticed by his guardian as Scarecrow. He turned the rattle the whole day in the quiet garden of Rodel’s farm to scare the sparrows from the early cherries, and from the salad-beds. But this, which in the beginning was only play, he soon gave up.

It was a pleasant, but also a troublesome office, that Amrie had undertaken. It was especially often painful that she could do nothing to attach the animals to her. Indeed, they were scarcely to be distinguished, one from another; and was it not true what Brown Mariann had once said to her as she came out of the Moosbrunnenwood?

“Animals that live in herds, are all, each for himself, stupid.”

“I think,” added Amrie, “that geese on this account are stupid; that they can do too much. They can swim, and run, and fly, but they are neither in the water, nor on the ground, nor in the air, expert, or at home, and that makes them stupid.”

“I will stand by this,” said Mariann, “in thee is concealed an old hermit.”

In fact there formed itself in Amrie a disposition to solitary dreaminess, which was rarely interrupted by the occurrences of life. But, as through all the dreaming and observation of nature she continued industriously to knit, and to let no stitch drop; and as on the corner by the service-tree, the deepening night shadows and the refreshing strawberries were so near each other, that they appeared to sprout from the same root:—thus were the distinct representations of nature and the dreamy twilight of life near each other in the heart of the child.

Holder Green was no solitary, secluded place, filled with fairy tales that the curious world only would willingly seek. In the midst, through the Holder Pasture, led a field-path, to Endringen, and not far from it stood the different colored boundary pillars, with the armorial bearings of the two gentlemen proprietors whose lands joined each other. Peasants passed through with every species of agricultural implements; men, women and girls went by with hatchets, sickles and scythes. The bailiffs of both estates often came through, and the reflection of their rifles glittered long before and long after they passed. Amrie was always greeted by the several bailiffs when she sat by the way, and was often asked whether this one or that one had passed by, but she never betrayed any one. Perhaps this concealment was from that inward dislike that the people, and especially the village children, have for the bailiff, who is always represented as the armed enemy of the peasantry, going about to seek whom he can insnare.

Old Manz, who was employed to break stones on the road, never spoke a word to Amrie. He went sadly from one heap of stones to another, and the sound of his pick was incessant as the tapping of the woodpecker, or the shrill chirp of the grasshoppers in the meadows and clover-field.