y-headed chirpings and twitterings as they
settled themselves to slumber on their perches for the night.

And when the time came that Andreas, grown to man's estate, being
one-and-twenty years old, but not to man's strength, for he was small of
stature and frail, was left lonely in the world--the good father killed
by a rock-fall in the mines, and the dear mother thereafter pining away
from earth, and so to the heaven that gave her husband back to her--it
was his house-mates the birds who did their best to cheer him with their
songs. And presently, as it seemed to him, these songs began to tell of
new happiness in a new home far away across the mountains and beyond the
sea--in that distant America where already his father's brother dwelt,
and whereof he had heard wonderful stories of splendors and of riches
incalculable all his life long. Indeed, the adventurous uncle had
prospered amazingly in the twenty years of his American exile: rising,
in due course, from the position of a young man of most promiscuous all
work in a delicatessen shop in New York to the position of owner of the
business, shop and all.

To go to a land where such things as this were possible seemed to
Andreas most wise; and to be near his uncle, and the aunt and cousins
whom he had never seen, his sole remaining kin, held out to him a
pleasant promise of cheer and comfort in his loneliness.

But, in very truth, the sweet burden of the song of his birds was not
born of thoughts of mere commonplace family affection and commonplace
worldly wealth. Far more precious than these was the motive of the
music that Andreas listened to and understood, and yet scarcely would
acknowledge, even to himself; for in America it was that Christine now
had her home--and that which set his heartstrings a-thrilling, as he
listened to the song of his birds, was the deep, pure melody of love.

They had been children together, he and Christine, their homes side by
side on the flanks of the Andreasberg; and when, three years before,
she had gone with her father and her mother on the long journey
westward, the heart of Andreas Stoffel had gone with her, and only his
body was left behind among the mountains of the Harz. And Christine had
dulled to him a little the keen edge of the sorrow of their parting by
admitting that she left her own heart in the place of the heart that she
bore away.

More than once had the rich uncle, owner of the delicatessen shop in New
York, wri