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Page 59
Looking quietly on these things, you are impressed with a sense of the
ease and comfort of which they speak, and you are moved with gratitude to
the Giver of all good.
Well, my dear friends and neighbours, such was the cottage of the Br�mers
in 1820, such were Br�mer himself, his wife Catherine, and their son,
little Fritz.
To my own mind they come back exactly as I have described them to you.
Christian Br�mer had served in the chasseurs of the Imperial Guard. After
1815 he had married Catherine, his old sweetheart, grown a little older,
but quite fresh and fair, and full of grace. With his own little
property, his house, and his four or five acres of vineyard, and
Catherine's added to it, Br�mer had become one of the most substantial
bourgeois of Dosenheim; he might have been mayor, or adjoint, or
municipal councillor, but these honours had no attractions for him; and
what pleased him best was, after work was over, to take down his old gun,
whistle for Friedland, and take him a turn in the woods.
Now it fell out one day that this worthy man, coming home after a day's
shooting, brought in his bag a little gipsy girl two or three years old,
as lively as a squirrel, and as brown as a hazel-nut. He had found her in
the bundle of an unhappy gipsy woman who had died of fatigue or hunger,
or both, at the foot of a tree.
You may well imagine what an outcry Catherine raised against this new
uninvited member of her family. But as Br�mer was master in his own
house, he simply announced to his wife that the child should be
christened by the name of Susanna Frederica Myrtle, and that she should
be brought up with little Fritz.
As a matter of course, all the women in the place, old and young, came
to pass their observations upon the little gipsy, whose serious and
thoughtful expression of countenance surprised them.
"This is not a child like others," said they; "she is a heathen--quite a
heathen! You may see by her eyes that she understands every word! She is
listening now! Mind what I say, Ma�tre Christian! Gipsies have claws at
the ends of their fingers. If you will rear young ferrets and weasels you
must not expect your poultry to be safe. They will have the run of all
the farm-yard!"
"Go and mind your own business!" shouted Br�mer. "I have seen Russians
and Spaniards, I have seen Italians, and Germans, and Jews; some were
brown, and some were black, some white, and others red; some had long
noses, and others had turned-down noses, but I found good fellows amongst
them all."
"Very likely," said the ladies, "but those people lived in houses, and
gipsies live in the open air."
He vouchsafed no reply to this argument, but with all possible politeness
he put them out by the shoulders.
"Go away," he cried; "I don't want your advice. It is time to air the
rooms, and then I have to go and attend to the stables."
But, after all, the rejected counsels were not so bad, as the event
unhappily showed a dozen or fourteen years afterwards.
Fritz was always delighted to feed the cattle, and take the horses to the
pond, and follow his father and learn to plough and sow, to reap and mow,
to tie up the sheaves and bring them home. But Myrtle had no wish to milk
the cows, churn the butter, shell peas, or peel potatoes.
When the maidens of Dosenheim, going out to wash clothes in the morning
at the river, called her the _heathen_, she mirrored herself complacently
in the fountain, and when she had admired her own long dark tresses, her
violet lips, her white teeth, her necklace of red berries, she would
smile and murmur to herself--
"Ah! they only call me a heathen because I am prettier than they are,"
and she would dip the tip of her little foot in the fountain and laugh.
But Catherine could not approve of such conduct, and said--
"Myrtle is not the least good to us. She won't do a single thing that is
useful. It is no use for me to preach, and advise, and scold, she does
everything the wrong way. The other day, when we were stowing away apples
in the closet, she took bites out of the best to see if they were ripe!
She has no pleasure but in gobbling up the best of everything."
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