“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, and even rich, serious farmers, who seldom wasted many words on anybody, and least of all on a poor child, now and then condescended to ask little Amrei one.  That she knew a great many herself was not strange, for she had probably learned them from Black Marianne; but that she was able to answer so many new ones caused general astonishment.  Amrei would soon have been unable to go across the street or into the fields without being stopped and questioned, if she had not found out a remedy; she made it a rule that she would not answer a riddle for anybody, unless she might propose one in return, and she managed to think up such good ones that the people stood still as if spell-bound.  Never had a poor child been so much noticed in the village as was this little Amrei.  But, as she grew older, less attention was paid to her, for people look with sympathetic eyes only at the blossom and the fruit, and disregard the long period of transition during which the one is ripening into the other.

Before Amrei’s school-days were over, Fate gave her a riddle that was difficult to solve.

The children had an uncle, a woodcutter, who lived some fifteen miles from Haldenbrunn, at Fluorn.  They had seen him only once, and that was at their parents’ funeral, when he had walked behind the magistrate, who had led the children by the hand.  After that time the children often dreamt about their uncle at Fluorn.  They were often told that this uncle was like their father, which made them still more anxious to see him; for although they still believed at times that their father and mother would some day suddenly reappear—­it could not be that they had gone away forever—­still, as the years rolled on, they gradually became reconciled to giving up this hope, especially after they had over and over again put berries on the graves, and had long been able to read the two names on the same black cross.  They also almost entirely forgot about the uncle in Fluorn, for during many years they had heard nothing of him.

But one day the children were called into their guardian’s house, and there sat a tall, heavy man with a brown face.