musical sound.

[Illustration: AN EASTER CARRIAGE.]

But odder than all these were the goats playing on guitars, or dragging
behind them fairy-like egg-shaped carriages, with little hares gravely
driving; and in others of these carriages were reclining one or two
(generally two) baby hares, or a hare mother rocking her little one in an
egg cradle; there were sugar balloons, in the baskets of which hares
watched over their nests full of eggs; wheelbarrows full of eggs, and
trundled by a hare; and dainty baskets of flowers, with birds perched upon
each handle, peering down into nests of eggs half hidden amidst the
blossoms. When one knows that each nest comes out, and forms the cover to
a box of _bonbons_ neatly concealed underneath, this pretty structure
certainly loses none of its attractiveness.

[Illustration: AN EASTER FANCY.]

In all directions signs of the approaching season begin to appear. Every
old woman in the market-place offers for sale a store of hard-boiled eggs,
smeared over with some highly colored varnish, besides candy chickens,
hares, etc., in abundance. All the various shop windows display pretty
emblematic articles. Besides the sugar and chocolate eggs, there are eggs
of soap and of glass; egg-shaped baskets and reticules; leather eggs,
which really are ladies' companions, and filled with sewing implements;
wooden eggs and porcelain eggs, and even egg-shaped lockets made of solid
gold.

It would be difficult to explain why these things appear at Easter, and
what they all mean. The eggs, as every one knows, we have at home, and
where they are in such abundance chickens will not be very far away. For
the lamb and the goat we can find scriptural interpretations, but the
rabbit and the hare--what can they have to do with Easter? Nine persons
out of ten can only answer, "The hares lay the Easter eggs." Queer hares
they must be, indeed, but the children here believe it as devoutly as they
do that the "Christ-kind" brings their Christmas presents, or as our own
little ones do in Santa Claus. No one knows exactly whence came this myth.
Many think it a relic of heathen worship; but a writer named Christoph von
Schmid, in an interesting story for children, suggests this much prettier
origin:

[Illustration: AN EASTER CRADLE.]

Many hundred years ago, a good and noble lady, Duchess Rosilinda von
Lindenburg, at a time when a cruel war was devastating the land, was
obliged to fly from her beautiful home