back, and could
always preserve as a happy memento of that winter of pleasure and of
pain. Roland never grew weary of greeting the familiar objects with
fresh delight. A feeling and love of home seemed to be roused in him,
for the first time, in its full intensity.

"I see now," he said to Eric, "that this living in hotels and anywhere
else than in one's own house is like living on a railway. I can go to
sleep, but I hear all the time the rattle of wheels in my dreams. That
is the way when we are abroad, but now we are at home again, and I have
a grandmother near by to visit, and an aunt, and the Major is a kind of
uncle, and Claus is like a faithful old tower. The dogs too are glad to
have me at home again. Nora looked at me a little strange at first, but
soon recognized me, and her pups are splendid. Now we will be busy and
merry again. It would be nice to plant a tree to remember this day by,
and have you plant one near it, don't you think so? Don't you feel as I
do, that you have just come into the world, and that all that has
happened before was only a dream? If I could only erect something that
should always be saying to me: Remember how happy you once were, and
how happy you are, and let nothing further trouble you in the world.
Oh, how beautiful it is here! The Rhine is broader than I remembered
it, and the mountains look down so upon me! I think I saw them in my
fever, but not so beautiful as they are now. It seems as if I could
compel the vineyards to grow green at once."

As he was walking with Eric along the river bank, he suddenly stood
still and said,--

"Hark, how the waves plash against the shore! Just so have they rippled
and plashed day and night when I was not here. Would it not be
beautiful to plunge into the waves and swim? Does not the rippling
tempt you too? It seems to me we did it centuries ago."

The boy had awaked to new life, and thoughts and feelings came bubbling
ceaselessly from his heart, as from an ever running fountain. He
delighted in having the people he met tell him how tall he had grown,
and how like a man he was looking.

Eric listened patiently to all his outpourings; the boy was tasting the
double pleasure of returning health and the opening spring.

"The hen cackles for herself and the cock," he exclaimed, the first
time he heard a hen; "and I am sure it is as beautiful a sound to them,
as the song of the nightingale is to us. Don't you think our barnyard
hen makes a grea