f us had done.

When he offered her his first brotherly greeting, she gazed at him with
her brilliant eyes, and said,

"I can see ten years ahead."

"Have you the gift of prophecy?"

"Oh pshaw! I don't mean that. What I mean is that in ten years from now
Ernst will look as you now do. But I hope that when that time comes, he
will not have to use spectacles."

Richard laughed, and so did Martella quite heartily.

There is nothing better than when two people laugh together at their
first meeting.

Later in the season, my daughter Johanna, who is the wife of a pastor
in the Oberland who had once been Ludwig's teacher, came with her
grown-up daughter to pay us a visit. Johanna's object in coming was to
receive the benefit of the milk cure.

At their very first meeting, she unintentionally affronted Martella.
Johanna always wore black silk netted gloves, and when, with too
evident an air of assumed kindness, she offered her hand to Martella,
the latter said to her:

"There is no need for a fly-net on your hand. I do not sting."

After this trifling circumstance, there was many a heart-burning
between Martella and Johanna. They were always at cross purposes.
Rothfuss was provoked, as he was unable to satisfy Martella that the
pastor's wife had not intended to affront her. Martella refused to be
convinced, and persisted in calling Johanna a "fly-net."

When she had once conceived an aversion for any one, she was immovable.
And when Johanna came to the cow stables, which she did twice every day
at milking-time, she would always in an ironical tone say, "Good-day,
madam sister-in-law."

Johanna found in this a cause for continued ill-feeling, to which, in
her discontented and susceptible condition, she readily gave way.

Johanna imagined that she had found the way to Martella's heart, by
assuring her how much she pitied her. But that only served to make
matters worse; for Martella resented any manifestation of pity.

As our household was conducted on a generous scale, there was much
that, in Johanna's eyes, contrasted unpleasantly with her own home. She
frequently alluded to the small pay her husband was earning, and often
gave us cause to remember that he would have been advanced much more
rapidly, if he had not been the son-in-law of a member of the party in
opposition to the government. She, in fact, made no concealment of her
belief that I was the cause of her husband's and her daughter's infirm
health. If