ttle life, short as it
seemed, was a blessing to us all, giving a perpetual image of serenity
and sweetness, recalling the lovely atmosphere of far-off homes, and
holding us by unsuspected ties to whatsoever things were pure.

_T. W. Higginson._

THE RED-WINGED GOOSE.

Once upon a time, when the rocks that make the earth were not so gray,
and the beard of the sea-waves not so hoary,--when the stars winked at
each other and said nothing, and the man in the moon thought of getting
married,--once upon a time, I say, there lived on the edge of a
pine-forest in Bohemia a poor peasant named Otto Koenig.

His hut was made of pine-branches, plastered with mud and thatched with
rye-straw; a hole in the top let the smoke out, and a hole in the side
let in father, mother, pigs, chickens, and children, beside a tame
jackdaw, that slept on an old stool by the fireplace, and ate with
Otto's nine children out of a wooden bowl.

Little enough the nine had to share with Meister Hans, as they called
the jackdaw, for they lived on black beans and black rye-bread.
Sometimes a bit of smoked bacon was found in the beans on great
feast-days, and sometimes in summer wild berries helped the dry bread to
savor and sweetness; but oftener the poor pig's-flesh and the red
strawberries were put into a rush basket, covered with great cool
leaves, on top of the eggs that lay so smooth and white below, and Otto
carried them to Prague, when he went there at full moon to sell the
turpentine he gathered in the pine-forest. With the money he got there
he bought serge to clothe the nine children, rancid oil to burn in the
clay lamp that sometimes they lighted in the long winter evenings, or
some coarse pottery for larger vessels than he could hew out of dead
branches with his dull hatchet. But it took all the coin that ever
rattled in his sheep-skin pouch to buy any clothes or enough food for
the nine black-eyed children who ran about in rags, and always wanted
more bread and beans than poor Marthon, their brown, hard-working
mother, had to give them.

At last, one winter there came a dreadful famine in Bohemia. There was
no rye for the fowls, or the bread; it was blasted in the ear during a
wet summer; and that same summer had given so little sunshine to the
fields that no berries ripened; the turnips rotted in the ground, so the
pig had nothing to eat; and between cold and starvation, quite tired