The little boy grew strong and healthy and with his merry ways delighted his father's heart, when he remained at home on Sundays, and sweetened all his mother's work on week-days, when his father was away until late in the evening.
Little Toni was now four years old and already knew how to be helpful in all sorts of small ways, in the house and the goat's shed and also in the field behind the hut. From morning until night he tripped happily behind his mother for he was as content as the little birds up in the old fir-tree.
When Saturday night came the mother scrubbed and cleaned with doubled energy, to finish early, for on that day the father was through his work earlier than other days, and she always went with little Toni by the hand, part way to meet him. This was a great delight to the child. He now knew very well how one task followed another in the household. When his mother began to scrub, he jumped around in the room, with delight and cried out again and again: "Now we are going for Father! Now we are going for Father!" until the moment came when his mother took him by the hand and started along.
Saturday evening had come again in the lovely month of May. Outdoors the birds in the trees were singing merrily up to the blue sky; indoors the mother was cleaning busily, in order to get out early into the golden evening, and meanwhile now outside, now in the house, little Toni was hopping around and shouting:
"Now we are going for Father!"
It was not long before the work was finished. The mother put on her shawl, tied on her best apron and stepped out of the house.
Toni jumped for joy and ran three times around his mother, then seized her hand and shouted once more:
"Now we are going for Father!"
Then he tripped along beside his mother in the lovely, sunny evening. They wandered to the Wild brook, over the wooden bridge, which crosses it, and came to the narrow foot-path, winding up through the flower-laden meadows to the farm where the father worked.
The last rays of the setting sun fell across the meadows and the sound of the evening bells came up from Kandergrund.