because I am an orphan they beat me! Oh, if my
father and mother knew of it!"--and then he cried twice as much over the
injustice of it. Damie let everybody give him things to eat, and thus
became greedy, while Amrei was satisfied with a little, and thus
acquired habits of moderation. Even the roughest boys were afraid of
Amrei, although nobody knew how she had proved her strength, while Damie
would run away from quite little boys. In school Damie was always up to
mischief; he shuffled his feet and turned down the leaves of the books
with his fingers as he read. Amrei, on the other hand, was always bright
and attentive, though she often wept in the school, not for the
punishment she herself received, but because Damie was so often
punished.

Amrei could please Damie best by telling him the answers to riddles. The
children still used to sit frequently by the house of their rich
guardian, sometimes near the wagons, sometimes near the oven behind the
house, where they used to warm themselves, especially in the autumn.
Once Amrei asked:

"What's the best thing about an oven?"

"You know I can't guess anything," replied Damie, plaintively.

"Then I'll tell you:

'In the oven this is best, 'tis said,
That it never itself doth eat the bread.'"

And then, pointing to the wagons before the house, Amrei asked:

"What's full of holes, and yet holds? "--and without waiting for a
reply, she gave the answer: "A chain!"

"Now you must let me ask you these riddles," said Damie.

And Amrei replied: "Yes, you may ask them. But do you see those sheep
coming yonder? Now I know another riddle."

"No!" cried Damie, "no! Two are enough for me--I can't remember three!"

"Yes, you must hear this one too, or else I'll take the others back!"

And Damie kept repeating to himself, anxiously: "A chain," "Eat it
itself," while Amrei asked:

"On which side have sheep the most wool?"--"Ba! ba! on the outside!" she
sang merrily.

Damie now ran off to ask his playmates these riddles; he kept his fists
tightly clenched, as if he were holding the riddles fast and was
determined not to let them go. But when he got to his playmates, he
remembered only the one about the chain; and Farmer Rodel's eldest son,
whom he hadn't asked at all and who was much too old for that sort of
thing, guessed the answer at once, and Damie ran back to his sister
crying.

Little Amrei's cleverness at riddles soon began to be talked about in
the village, a