he hard work of
summer upon the quiet alms, of winter in the smoke-blackened hall,
spinning with the maids. My mother died early, and my brothers were
killed by the Italians. So I grew up lonely, no one near me but my old
father, who was as true, but also as hard and close, as his native
rocks. There I saw nothing of the world which lay outside our
mountains. Only sometimes, from a height, I watched with curiosity a
pack-horse going along the road deep below in the valley, laden with
salt or wine. I sat through many a shining summer evening upon the
jagged peaks of the high Arn, and looked at the sun sinking splendidly
over the far-away river Licus; and I wondered what it had seen the
whole long summer day, since it had risen over the broad [OE]nus; and I
thought how I should like to know what things looked like at the other
side of the Karwaendel, or away behind the Brennus, over which my
brothers had gone and had never returned. And yet I felt how beautiful
it was up there in the green solitude, where I heard the golden eagle
screaming in its near eyrie, and where I plucked more lovely flowers
than ever grow in the plains, and even, sometimes, heard by night the
mountain-wolf howling outside the stable-door, and frightened it away
with a torch. In early autumn, too, and in the long winter, I had time
to sit and muse; when the white mist-veils spun themselves over the
lofty pines; when the mountain wind tore the blocks of stone from our
straw-roof, and the avalanches thundered from the precipices. So I grew
up, strange to the world beyond the next forest, only at home in the
quiet world of my thoughts, and in the narrow life of the peasant. Then
thou earnest--I remember it as if it had happened yesterday----"

She ceased, lost in recollection.

"I remember it too, exactly," said Witichis. "I was leading a
centumvirate from Juvavia to the Augusta-town on the Licus. I had lost
my way and my people. For a long time I had wandered about in the
sultry summer day, without finding a path, when I saw smoke rising
above a fir-tree grove, and soon I found a hidden farm, and entered
the yard-gate. There stood a splendid girl at the pump, lifting a
bucket----"

"Look, even here in the valley, in this southern valley of the Alps, it
is often too close for me; and I long for a breath of air from the
pine-woods of my mountains. But at court, in the narrow gilded
chambers! there I should languish and pine away. Leave me here; I sha