Here among the high mountains she lives with her father, mother, and brothers; and far up among those high snowy peaks, which are seen behind the house, the chamois live, many of them together, eating the tender grass and little pink-colored flowers, and leaping and springing away over the ice and snow when they see the men coming up to hunt them.
I will tell you by and by how it happened that Jeannette's tall brother Joseph carved this tiny chamois from wood. But first you must know about this small house upon the great hills, and how they live up there so near the blue sky.
One would think it might be easier for a child to be good and pure so far up among the quiet hills, and that there God would seem to come close to the spirit, even of a little girl or boy.
On the sides of the mountains tall trees are growing,—pine and fir trees, which are green in winter as well as in summer. If you go into the woods in winter, you will find that almost all the trees have dropped their pretty green leaves upon the ground, and are standing cold and naked in the winter wind; but the pines and the firs keep on their warm green clothes all the year round.
It was many years ago, before Jeannette was born, that her father came to the mountains with his sharp axe and cut down some of the fir-trees. Other men helped him, and they cut the great trees into strong logs and boards, and built of them the house of which I have told you. Now he will have a good home of his own for as long as he likes to live there, and to it will come his wife and children as God shall send them, to nestle among the hills.
Then he went down to the little town at the foot of the mountain, and when he came back, he was leading a brown, long-eared donkey, and upon that donkey sat a rosy-cheeked young woman, with smiling brown eyes, and long braids of brown hair hanging below a little green hat set on one side of her head, while beautiful rose-colored carnations peeped from beneath it on the other side. Who was this? It wasn't Jeannette: you know I told you this was before she was born. Can you guess, or must I tell you that it was the little girl's mother? She had come up the mountain for the first time to her new home,—the house built of the fir and the pine,—where after awhile were born Jeannette's two tall brothers, and at last Jeannette herself.
It was a good place to be born in. When she was a baby she used to lie on the short, sweet grass before the doorstep, and watch the cows and the goats feeding, and clap her little hands to see how rosy the sunset made the snow that shone on the tops of those high peaks. And the next summer, when she could run alone, she picked the blue-eyed gentians, thrusting her small fingers between their fringed eyelids, and begging them to open and look at little Jean; and she stained her wee hands among the strawberries, and pricked them with the thorns of the long raspberry-vines, when she went with her mother in the afternoon to pick the sweet fruit for supper. Ah, she was a happy little thing! Many a fall she got over the stones or among the brown moss, and many a time the clean frock that she wore was dyed red with the crushed berries; but, oh, how pleasant it was to find them in great patches on the mountain-side, where the kind sun had warmed them into such delicious life! I have seen the children run out of school to pick such sweet wild strawberries, all the recess-time, up in the fields of Maine; and how happy they were with their little stained fingers as they came back at the call of the bell!
In the black bog-mud grew the Alpen roses, and her mother said, "Do not go there, my little daughter, it is too muddy for you." But at night, when her brother came home from the chamois hunt, he took off his tall, pointed hat, and showed his little sister the long spray of roses twisted round it, which he had brought for her. He could go in the mud with his thick boots, you know, and never mind it.
Here they live alone upon the mountain; there are no near neighbors. At evening they can see the blue smoke curling from the chimney of one house that stands behind that sunny green slope, a hundred yards from their door, and they can always look down upon the many houses of the town below, where the mother lived when she was young.
Many times has Jeannette wondered how the people lived down there,—so many together; and where their cows could feed, and whether there were any little girls like herself, and if they picked berries, and had such a dear old black nanny-goat as hers, that gave milk for her supper, and now had two little black kids, its babies. She didn't know about those little children in Maine, and that they have little kids and goats, as well as sweet red berries, to make the days pass happily.