The Erckmann-Chatrian MEGAPACK ®. Emile Erckmann

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.”

      Brémer himself could not help admitting that there was a very heathenish spirit in her when he heard his wife crying from morning till night, “Myrtle, Myrtle! where are you now? Ah, naughty, bad girl! she has run away into the woods again to gather blackberries.” But still he laughed to himself, and pitied poor Catherine, whom he compared to a hen with a brood of ducklings.

      Every year after harvest-time Fritz and Myrtle spent whole days far away from the farm, pasturing the cattle, singing, and whistling, and baking potatoes under the ashes, and coming down the rocky hill in the evening blowing the shepherd’s horn.

      These were some of Myrtle’s happiest days. Seated before the burning hemp-stalks, with her pretty brown face between her hands, she lost herself in endless reveries.

      The long strings of wild ducks and geese which traverse, about the end of autumn, the boundless heavens spread from the mountains on the east to the western hills, seemed to have a depressing effect upon her mind. She used to follow them with longing eyes, straining them as if to overtake the wild birds in the immeasurable distance; and suddenly she would rise, spread out her arms, and cry—

      “I must go! I must go! I can’t stay!”

      Then she would weep with her head bowed down, and Fritz, seeing her in tears, would cry too, asking—

      “Why do you cry, Myrtle? Has anybody hurt you? Is it any of the boys in the village?—Kasper, Wilhelm, Heinrich? Only tell me, and I will knock him down at once! Do tell!”

      “No; it is not that.”

      “Well, why are you crying?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “Do you want to run as far as the Falberg?”

      “No; that is not far enough.”

      “Where do you want to go?”

      “Down there! down there! ever so far! where the birds are going.”

      This made Fritz open his eyes and his mouth very wide.

      One day in September, when they were idling along by the woods, about noon, the heat was so great and the air so still that the smoke of their little fire, instead of rising straight into the air, fell like water and crept among the briars. The grasshopper had ceased its dull monotonous chirp, not the buzzing of a fly was to be heard, nor the warbling of a bird. The oxen and the cows, with sleepy eyes half-closed, their knees bent under them, were resting together under a spreading oak in the meadow, now and then lowing in a slow, protracted way as if in idle protest against such hot weather.

      Fritz had begun by plaiting the strands of his whip, but he soon lay down in the long grass with his hat over his eyes, and Friedland came to lie near him, gaping from ear to ear.

      Myrtle alone suffered no inconvenience from the overwhelming heat; sitting on the ground near the fire, with her arms wreathed around her knees, full in the sun, her large dark eyes slowly surveyed the dark arches formed by the branches of the forest.

      Time passed on slowly. The distant village clock had struck twelve, then one, and two, and the young gipsy never stirred. In the woods and jagged mountain-tops, the crags, the forests, descending into the valleys, she heard some mysterious call. They spoke to her in a language not unknown to her.

      “Yes,” she said to herself, “yes; I have seen all that before—long ago—a long time ago.”

      Then with a quick, sharp glance at Fritz, who was in a deep sleep, she rose to her feet and began to fly. Her light footsteps scarcely bent the grass beneath her; she ran on and on, up the hill; Friedland turned his head round with a careless glance, then stretched out once more his languid limbs, and composed himself to sleep.

      Myrtle disappeared in the midst of the brambles which border the common wood. At one bound she cleared the muddy ditch where a single frog was croaking amongst the rushes, and twenty minutes after she reached the top of the Roche Creuse, whence you may have a wide prospect of Alsace and the blue summits of the Vosges.

      Then she turned to see if anybody was following her. She could still distinguish Fritz asleep in the green meadow with his hat over his eyes, and Friedland and the sleeping cattle under their tree.

      Farther on she could see the village, the river, the roof of the farm-house, with its flights of pigeons eddying round; the long, crooked street and red-petticoated women walking leisurely up and down; the little ivy-covered church where the good curé Niclausse had baptised her into the Christian faith and afterwards confirmed her.

      And when she had sufficiently contemplated these objects, turning her face the other way towards the mountain, she was filled with delight to mark how the densely-crowded firs covered the hill-sides, up to their highest ridge, close as the grass of the fields.

      At the sight of all this grandeur the young gipsy felt her heart beating and expanding with unknown delight, and again running on she darted through a rift between the rocks, lined with mosses and ferns, to reach the beaten track through the woods.

      Her whole soul—that wild, untrained soul of hers—was rushing with her and impelling her onwards, kindling her countenance with a new ardour. With her hands she clung to the ivy, with her naked feet she clung to the projections and the crevices to push on her way.

      Soon she was on the other slope, running, tripping, leaping, sometimes stopping short to gaze upon surrounding objects—a large tree, a ravine, a lonely sheet of water, or a pond full of flowers and sweet-smelling water-plants.

      Although she could not remember ever having seen those copses, those clearings, those heaths, at every turn in the path she would say to herself, “There, I knew it was so! I knew that tree would be there! I was sure of that rock! And there’s the waterfall just below!” Although a thousand strange remembrances passed with momentary flashes, like sudden visions, through her mind, she could not understand it all and could explain nothing. She had not yet been able to say to herself, “What Fritz and the rest of them want to make them happy is the village, and the meadow, and the farm-house, and the fruit-trees, and the orchard, and the milk-cows, and the laying hens; plenty in the cellar, plenty in the granary, and a nice warm fire on the hearth in winter. But what have I to do with all these things? Wasn’t I born a heathen, quite a heathen? I was born in the woods, just as the squirrel was born in an oak, just as a hawk was hatched on the crag and the thrush in the fir-tree!”

      It is true she had never thought of these things, but she was guided by instinct; and this mysterious force drew her unconsciously about sunset to the bare heaths of the Kohle Platz, where the gangs of gipsies that wander between Alsace and Lorraine are accustomed to stay the night, and hang