“And depend upon it, she is a lady!”
Thekla’s voice was positively fretful. Max was vexed for a moment; then, remembering how patiently her little hands had worked all the morning smoothing shirts and stockings for him, his heart grew tender. Instead of going on with the dispute, he moved his seat closer; and, pulling the flushed cheek down on his shoulder, began to cool it with gentle wavings of his palm-leaf fan. It was extremely pleasant and comfortable. Thekla closed her eyes: then she began to think of a long procession of sheep jumping over a fence; and to count them one by one, first a fleecy head, then a woolly tail;—and next she was fast asleep. After which, she waked up suddenly; for Max gave a sudden jump, and behold, August was close to them.
Thekla was wrong, after all; and Max right. For there stood a handsome young man, with quick, fiery eyes and a bronzed face, round which floated locks of auburn hair. He seemed very hot, and was wiping the drops from his forehead; but, for all his good looks, there was something about him from which the children rather shrank.
Yet he did not appear a bad fellow either; for he made himself at home on the door-step, and borrowed the palm-leaf as if he had been one of the family. Any thing so curious or beautiful as his dress the children had never before seen. It was a loosely fitting garment of vivid green, thickly wrought all over with a pattern in which ferns and vines and dense, bright leaves were interlaced and twisted in the most wonderful manner. A chain of fire-flies swung about his neck like a collar, his hat was looped up at the side with a glow-worm of immense size, which, whenever he moved, glanced and gleamed in a sudden and bewildering way.
“What’s the matter?” he asked Thekla, in rather an abrupt tone.
“I’m a little tired, sir,” she replied timidly.
“Oh, ho!” said August. “I’ve caught you. You’ve been working at something! I never mistake the signs. Now see here,—that’s a thing I don’t allow: it’s against my rules. You may thank your luck I was not here. Whenever I find children doing it, I give them a rap of some sort to remember me by. So recollect that, and look out.”
Thekla shrank back, half alarmed; for, though August laughed, his voice was menacing. And she reflected with satisfaction that the big wash just concluded would be the last before winter. For you must know that, in the Black Forest, Monday is not the terrible occasion it is with us, and “washing days” come round a great way apart, once in three months perhaps, or something like that.
“I’m going to tell you,” said August, after sitting some time in silence, with his eyes glaring at vacancy,—“I’m going to tell you the history of a spark of fire.
“It was born in a hunter’s pipe. When he had done smoking, he shook out the hot ashes, and went his way. Most of them died in silence; but one, my little spark, fell upon a brown leaf in a lonely place.