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As a matter of course, all the women in the place, old and young, came to pass their observations upon the little gipsy, whose serious and thoughtful expression of countenance surprised them.

“This is not a child like others,” said they; “she is a heathen–quite a heathen! You may see by her eyes that she understands every word! She is listening now! Mind what I say, Maitre Christian! Gipsies have claws at the ends of their fingers. If you will rear young ferrets and weasels you must not expect your poultry to be safe. They will have the run of all the farm-yard!”

“Go and mind your own business!” shouted Bremer. “I have seen Russians and Spaniards, I have seen Italians, and Germans, and Jews; some were brown, and some were black, some white, and others red; some had long noses, and others had turned-down noses, but I found good fellows amongst them all.”

“Very likely,” said the ladies, “but those people lived in houses, and gipsies live in the open air.”

He vouchsafed no reply to this argument, but with all possible politeness he put them out by the shoulders.

“Go away,” he cried; “I don’t want your advice. It is time to air the rooms, and then I have to go and attend to the stables.”

But, after all, the rejected counsels were not so bad, as the event unhappily showed a dozen or fourteen years afterwards.

Fritz was always delighted to feed the cattle, and take the horses to the pond, and follow his father and learn to plough and sow, to reap and mow, to tie up the sheaves and bring them home. But Myrtle had no wish to milk the cows, churn the butter, shell peas, or peel potatoes.

When the maidens of Dosenheim, going out to wash clothes in the morning at the river, called her the heathen, she mirrored herself complacently in the fountain, and when she had admired her own long dark tresses, her violet lips, her white teeth, her necklace of red berries, she would smile and murmur to herself–

“Ah! they only call me a heathen because I am prettier than they are,” and she would dip the tip of her little foot in the fountain and laugh.

But Catherine could not approve of such conduct, and said–

“Myrtle is not the least good to us. She won’t do a single thing that is useful. It is no use for me to preach, and advise, and scold, she does everything the wrong way. The other day, when we were stowing away apples in the closet, she took bites out of the best to see if they were ripe! She has no pleasure but in gobbling up the best of everything.”

Bremer himself could not help admitting that there was a very heathenish spirit in her when he heard his wife crying from morning till night, “Myrtle, Myrtle! where are you now? Ah, naughty, bad girl! she has run away into the woods again to gather blackberries.” But still he laughed to himself, and pitied poor Catherine, whom he compared to a hen with a brood of ducklings.

Every year after harvest-time Fritz and Myrtle spent whole days far away from the farm, pasturing the cattle, singing, and whistling, and baking potatoes under the ashes, and coming down the rocky hill in the evening blowing the shepherd’s horn.

These were some of Myrtle’s happiest days. Seated before the burning hemp-stalks, with her pretty brown face between her hands, she lost herself in endless reveries.

The long strings of wild ducks and geese which traverse, about the end of autumn, the boundless heavens spread from the mountains on the east to the western hills, seemed to have a depressing effect upon her mind. She used to follow them with longing eyes, straining them as if to overtake the wild birds in the immeasurable distance; and suddenly she would rise, spread out her arms, and cry–

“I must go! I must go! I can’t stay!”