CHAPTER IV
WHAT GRETCHEN LEARNED AT SUNDAY SCHOOL
The early days of March had come. In the meadows the primulas and white anemones were blooming, and in the fields the farmers were rushing their spring work with all their might, for each one wanted to be first to get his potatoes into the ground. Plowing and sowing were everywhere waiting to be done. There was much need of help, and boys were in demand once more. So it happened that Renti found a new place on the very next day after he left the shoemaker. Early on Sunday morning he started out with his little bundle; but it was a very different bundle from the one that he had brought with him from Lindenhof. He had had nothing new since the day he left there, and his old clothes were in rags. The little Sunday jacket, once so neat and stout looking, was now thin and shabby, and the fresh face and bright eyes that had gone with the jacket when it was new wore quite a different look when Renti presented himself at Brook Farm, his new home. The place was so named because the farm extended along the margin of a large stream that flowed through the lower part of Buschweil. Renti reached the new place quite early, before the farmer had started for church.
Gretchen was happy once more that Sunday morning, for she had heard the alms commissioner telling her father, as they came from church, that Renti was to go to Brook Farm, and that it would be a good change for the boy, as there was very poor order in the shoemaker's household, and the boy had probably not had much to eat.
Afterward, when they were sitting at dinner, Gretchen's father began to speak of Renti. On Sundays he was always more talkative at the table than during the week, for that was the only day when they had plenty of time to eat and did not have to hurry back to work.
"Brook Farm," he said, "is an excellent place for the boy. They do not keep a hired man there and have few laborers; so he will be with the farmer a great deal and right in his sight. Perhaps he can thus be brought back to proper ways and made to forget his runaway habits."