Amrie informed her brother one day with delight, that she had found out where the cuckoo clock of their parents was. Mathew, the coal-burner, had bought it; in the evening they went and stood near the house and waited till the clock cried cuckoo,—then they looked at each other and laughed.
The children continued every morning to go to their parents’ house, knock at the door, call and wait. Then they played at the fish-pond, as we have seen them to-day. Afterwards they listened to a call which they used not to hear at this season of the year, for the cuckoo at Mathew’s called eight times.
“We must to the school,” said Amrie, and hastened with her brother through the garden paths into the village. As they passed behind the barn of Farmer Rodel, Dami said, “Our guardian has had a great deal of threshing done to-day,” and he pointed to the straw that hung as a trophy over the half door of the barn. Amrie nodded silently.
CHAPTER II.
THE FAR-OFF SPIRIT.
FARMER RODEL, whose house, ornamented with red striped beams, and a pious sentence, enclosed in the form of a heart, stood not far from the Josenhans dwelling, had himself appointed by the Mayor, guardian of the orphan children. His guardianship consisted in nothing more than in preserving the unsold clothes of their father, and when he met or passed one of the children in the street he would ask, “Have you clothes enough?” and, without waiting to be answered, he would pass on. Yet the children felt a strange pride in having that great farmer called their guardian. They often stood by the great house and looked longingly at it, as though they expected something, they knew not what, and they sat often down by the ploughs and harrows at the corner of the shed and read over again and again the pious sentence on the house. The house spoke to them if all others were silent.
The Sunday before All Souls, the children played again before their parents’ deserted house. They seemed, as it were, banished to this place. There came along the wife of Farmer Landfried from the Hochdorfer Road. She had a red silk umbrella under her arm and a dark hymn-book in her hand. She had come to make her last visit in the place of her birth. Yesterday, her servant in a four-horse wagon had taken all her furniture out of the village, and early this morning with her husband and three children she would move to their lately purchased estate in the far-off district of Allgäu. When at some distance she nodded to the children; but they saw nothing but the melancholy expression upon the face of the woman. As she now stood by them she said, “God bless you, children! what do you do here? to whom do you belong?”
“To the Josenhans,” answered Amrie, pointing towards the house.
“Oh! you poor children,” she cried, striking her hands together; “I should have known you, lass! exactly so did your mother look, when we went to school together. We were good comrades and friends, and your father worked with my cousin, Farmer Rodel. I know all about you—but tell me, Amrie, why have you no shoes on? You will take cold in this wet weather. Say to Mariann that Farmer Landfried’s wife, from Hochdorf, said it was not right to let you run about in this manner; no—you need say nothing. I will speak to her. But, Amrie, you must now be sensible and prudent, and take care of yourself. Think of it—what if thy mother knew that in this time of the year you went about barefoot!”