"I am afraid not, indeed," said his wife. "We shall work our way laboriously through wild hedges and thick underbrush, like the unfortunate suitors of the Sleeping Beauty, to find at last——"
"Poetry itself!" cried Elizabeth. "Why, the first delicious bloom will be brushed from our woodland life if we cannot live in the old castle! Certainly there must be four sound walls and a whole roof in some one of its old towers, and with heads to plan and strong willing hands to execute, the rest can be very easily arranged. We will stop up cracks with moss, nail boards over doorways that have lost their doors, and paper our four walls ourselves; we can cover the worm-eaten floors with homemade straw mats; declare war to the death upon the gray-coated, four-footed little thieves who would invade our larder, and soon banish all cobwebs by a good broom skilfully wielded."
With glowing looks, quite carried away by her dreams of the future home in the fresh green forest, she went to the piano and opened it. It was an old, worn-out instrument, whose hoarse, weak tones harmonized perfectly with its shabby exterior; but, nevertheless, beneath Elizabeth's fingers Mendelssohn's song, "Through the dark green Forest," rang deliciously through the little room.
Her parents sat quietly listening. Little Ernst dropped asleep. Without, the howling of the storm was lulled, but the snow was driving noiselessly past the uncurtained window in huge flakes. The opposite chimneys, no longer smoking, had put on thick white night-caps, and looked stiffly and coldly, like peevish old age, into the little attic room, which enclosed, in the midst of the snow-storm, a perfect spring of joy and gaiety within its four walls.
CHAPTER III.
Whitsuntide! A word that will thrill with its magic the human soul as long as trees burst into leaf, larks soar trilling aloft, and clear spring skies laugh above us. A word which can awaken an echo of spring in hearts encrusted with selfishness and greed of gain, chilled by the snows of age, or deadened by grief and care.
Whitsuntide is at hand. A gentle breeze flutters over the Thuringian mountains, and brushes from their brows the last remains of the snow which whirls mistily into the air and leaves its old abiding-place in the guise of luminous spring clouds. Freed from their wintry garments, the mountains deck their rugged brows with wreaths of young strawberry vines and bilberries. In the valley below, the rippling trout-stream is flowing forth from the dark forest directly across the flower-strewn meadow.
The lonely saw-mill is clacking merrily, while its low thatched roof shines white with the fallen blossoms of the sheltering fruit trees.
Before the windows of the scattered huts of the wood-cutters and of the villagers many an accomplished bullfinch was singing in his little cage the airs which were the fruits of a course of instruction in high art, daring the winter in the hot, close room of his master. And his brothers in the forest were trilling wilder but far sweeter lays, for their little throats inhaled the clear air of freedom.
Where, a few weeks before, the melted snow had foamed down from the mountain tops in a bed created by its own torrent, beautiful moss was now weaving a soft carpet, that would soon quite conceal the scarred breast of the mountain, while here and there, through the thick green the silver thread of some little stream glittered in the sunlight.