FullReads

The mother, by a little kind manoeuvring, generally induced the father to sup and take his evening pipe with a neighbour, for the tradesman was one of those whose presence is rather a “wet blanket” upon all innocent folly and fun. Then she good-naturedly took herself off to household matters, and the children were left in undisturbed possession of the stove, round which they gathered with the book, and the game commenced. Each in turn read whichever poem he preferred; and the reader for the time being, was wrapt in a huge hood and cloak, kept for the purpose, and was called the “Maerchen-Frau,” or Story Woman. Sometimes the song had a chorus, which all the children sang to whichever suited best of the thousand airs that are always floating in German brains. Sometimes, if the ballad was a favourite one, the others would take part in any verses that contained a dialogue. This was generally the case with some verses in the pet ballad of Bluebeard, at that exciting point where Sister Anne is looking from the castle window. First the Maerchen-Frau read in a sonorous voice–

“Schwester Aennchen, siehst du nichts?”
(Sister Anne, do you see nothing?)

Then the others replied for Anne–

“Staeubchen fliegen, Graeschen wehen.”
(A little dust flies, a little grass waves.)

Again the Maerchen-Frau–

“Aennchen, laesst sich sonst nichts sehen?”
(Little Anne, is there nothing else to be seen?)

And the unsatisfactory reply–

“Schwesterchen, sonst seh’ ich nichts!”
(Little sister, I see nothing else!)

After this the Maerchen-Frau finished the ballad alone, and the conclusion was received with shouts of applause and laughter, that would have considerably astonished the good father, could he have heard them, and that did sometimes oblige the mother to call order from the loft above, just for propriety’s sake; for, in truth, the good woman loved to hear them, and often hummed in with a chorus to herself as she turned over the clothes among which she was busy.

At last, however, after having been for years the crowning enjoyment of St. Nicholas’s Day, the credit of the Maerchen-Frau was doomed to fade. The last reading had been rather a failure, not because the old ballad-book was supplanted by a new one, or because the children had outgrown its histories; perhaps–though they did not acknowledge it–Friedrich was in some degree to blame.

His increasing knowledge, the long readings in the bookseller’s shop, which his brothers and sisters neither shared nor knew of, had given him a feeling of contempt for the one book on which they feasted from year to year; and his part, as Maerchen-Frau, had been on this occasion more remarkable for yawns than for anything else. The effect of this failure was not confined to that day. Whenever the book was brought out, there was the same feeling that the magic of it was gone, and very greatly were the poor children disquieted by the fact.

At last, one summer’s day, in the year of which we are writing, one of the boys was struck, as he fancied, by a brilliant idea; and as brilliant ideas on any subject are precious, he lost no time in summoning a council of his brothers and sisters in the garden. It was a half-holiday, and they soon came trooping round the great linden tree–where the bees were already in full possession–and the youngest girl, who was but six years old, bore the book hugged fast in her two arms.

The boy opened the case–as lawyers say–by describing the loss of interest in their book since the last Feast of St. Nicholas. “This did not,” he said, “arise from any want of love to the stories themselves, but from the fact of their knowing them so well. Whatever ballad the Maerchen-Frau chose, every line of it was so familiar to each one of them that it seemed folly to repeat it. In these circumstances it was evident that the greatest compliment they could pay the stories was to forget them, and he had a plan for attaining this desirable end. Let them deny themselves now for their future pleasure; let them put away the Maerchen-Frau till next St. Nicholas’s Day, and, in the meantime, let each of them do his best to forget as much of it as he possibly could.” The speaker ceased, and in the silence the bees above droned as if in answer, and then the children below shouted applause until the garden rang.