d
with a fine open brow, looking calm and thoughtful, is dandling on his
knee a fine stout boy, whistling the call to "boot and saddle."

There lies the quiet village at the end of the valley, framed, as you
sit, in the little cottage window; the river is leaping over the mill-dam
and crossing the winding street; the old houses, with their deep and
gloomy eaves, their barns, their gabled windows, their nets drying in the
sun; the young girls, kneeling by the river-side on the stones, washing
linen; the cattle lazily lounging down to drink, and gravely lowing
amidst the willows; the young herdsmen cracking their whips; the mountain
summit, jagged like a saw by the pointed fir-tree tops--all these rural
objects lie reflected in the flowing blue stream, only broken by the
fleets of ducks sailing down or the occasional passage of an old tree
rooted up on the mountain-side.

Looking quietly on these things, you are impressed with a sense of the
ease and comfort of which they speak, and you are moved with gratitude to
the Giver of all good.

Well, my dear friends and neighbours, such was the cottage of the Bremers
in 1820, such were Bremer himself, his wife Catherine, and their son,
little Fritz.

To my own mind they come back exactly as I have described them to you.

Christian Bremer had served in the chasseurs of the Imperial Guard. After
1815 he had married Catherine, his old sweetheart, grown a little older,
but quite fresh and fair, and full of grace. With his own little
property, his house, and his four or five acres of vineyard, and
Catherine's added to it, Bremer had become one of the most substantial
bourgeois of Dosenheim; he might have been mayor, or adjoint, or
municipal councillor, but these honours had no attractions for him; and
what pleased him best was, after work was over, to take down his old gun,
whistle for Friedland, and take him a turn in the woods.

Now it fell out one day that this worthy man, coming home after a day's
shooting, brought in his bag a little gipsy girl two or three years old,
as lively as a squirrel, and as brown as a hazel-nut. He had found her in
the bundle of an unhappy gipsy woman who had died of fatigue or hunger,
or both, at the foot of a tree.

You may well imagine what an outcry Catherine raised against this new
uninvited member of her family. But as Bremer was master in his own
house, he simply announced to his wife that the child should be
christened by the name of Sus