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.
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