e instructed
by the Redemptorist Fathers in the way of godliness. So these little
ones grew in years and in knowledge and in grace together, and towards
each other they felt a sisterly love.

[Illustration: Instructed by the Redemptorist Fathers 278]

Insensibly, too, as Roschen grew out of childhood into girlhood, her
attitude towards her adoptive father changed. In the great matters
of her life he still cared for her, planning always for her good, and
withholding from her nothing suited to her station in life that money
could buy. In the matter of her music, Aunt Hedwig declared that he
was positively extravagant; yet accepted in good part his excuse that
a voice so beautiful deserved to be well trained. It was her mother's
voice alive again, he said; and as he spoke, Aunt Hedwig saw that there
were tears in his eyes. But while Andreas still continued the larger
of his parental duties, in the smaller matters of every-day life his
adopted daughter now cared for him; so beginning to pay the debt (though
to neither of them, such was their love for each other, did any thought
of debt or of payment ever occur) that she owed him for all his goodness
to her and to her dead father and mother in the past.

In truth, it was a pretty sight to see Roschen first beginning to play
at keeping house for her father--for so she always called him--and
then, in a little while, keeping house for him most excellently in real
earnest. Here, again, the good qualities of Aunt Hedwig came to the
front, for to her intelligent direction was due the rather surprising
success that attended Roschen's ambitious attempt to become so early a
_hausfrau_. Time and again was a great culinary disaster averted by a
rapid dash on Roschen's part from her imperilled home to the bakery,
where Aunt Hedwig's advice was quickly obtained and then was promptly
acted upon. And if sometimes the advice came too late to avert the
catastrophe--as on that memorable and dreadful day when Roschen boiled
her sausage-dumplings without tying them in a bag--the lessons taught
by calamitous experience caused only passing trouble, and tended, in the
long-run, to good.

Indeed, by the time that Roschen was sixteen years old, and had so far
passed through her apprenticeship that she no longer was compelled
to make sudden and frantic appeals to Aunt Hedwig for aid, the little
household over which she presided so blithely was very admirably
managed; and it certainly was as quain