He walked on, silently, looking with dreamy eyes out of the dim present into the untried future.
One year after, he stood by the mother's new made grave, and, while his heart swelled with sorrow, he blessed God that he had been to his care-burdened mother a loving and dutiful son. And then came the thought of the old clothes that, for her sake, he had worn so long, and he could have kissed the dear old clothes, grown so patched and threadbare, for her sake, the dear, dead mother.
After the mother's death, the family was broken up.
The little Ethel and Julian went away to another part of the country, to live with a good aunt, who was very kind to them, and the younger brothers went to trades, and only Karl and the father remained at the cottage. Then it was that Karl brought home the sweet-voiced Chimlein to be the angel of his house.
"The dear father is lonely," she would say, as with her quiet words, and small, white hands she smoothed his pathway down the rugged vale of dim old age.
The good God only lends us the presence of his angels for a short time, and in the spring-time he called Chimlein from her home by the blue Rhine River, to her home in heaven, the golden, and from the heart of Karl, her husband, to the bosom of the blessed Mother.
The cottage was very dark and lonely after Chimlein went to heaven. Karl went out to his work with a sad heart, and returned in silence to sit by his desolate hearth-stone, till the fire went out in the midnight darkness.
The father (now an old man with locks white as the driven snow) sat during the long, summer days by the little willow cradle, and sang in the shrill treble of broken and sorrowful old age, to Chimlein's little one; or, when the babe was full of playful innocent life, he would take it down to the banks of the clear Rhine, to revel in the sunshine and listen to the voice of the waters.
To the old man's desolate heart, that child was a priceless blessing, and in his eyes she was the most beautiful of all the good Lord's fair creation.