She wanted to go down and see, some day, and her father promised that, when she was a great girl, she should go down with him on market-days, to sell the goats’-milk cheeses and the sweet butter that her mother made.

When the cows and goats have eaten all the grass near the house, her father drives them before him up farther among the mountains, where more grass is growing, and there he stays with them many weeks:  he does not even come home at night, but sleeps in a small hut among the rocks, where, too, he keeps the large clean milk-pails, and the little one-legged stool upon which he sits at morning and night to milk the cows and goats.

When the pails are full, the butter is to be made, and the cheese; and he works while the animals feed.  The cows have little bells tied to their necks, that he may hear and find them should they stray too far.

Many times, when he is away, does his little daughter at home listen, listen, while she sits before the door, to hear the distant tinkling of the cow-bells.  She is a loving little daughter, and she thinks of her father so far away alone, and wishes he was coming home to eat some of the sweet strawberries and cream for supper.

Last summer some travellers came to the house.  They stopped at the door and asked for milk; the mother brought them brimming bowlsful, and the shy little girl crept up behind her mother with her birch-bark baskets of berries.  The gentlemen took them and thanked her, and one told of his own little Mary at home, far away over the great sea.  Jeannette often thinks of her, and wonders whether her papa has gone home to her.

While the gentlemen talked, Jeannette’s brother Joseph sat upon the broad stone doorstep and listened.  Presently one gentleman, turning to him, asked if he would come with them over the mountain to lead the way, for there are many wild places and high, steep rocks, and they feared to get lost.

Joseph sprang up from his low seat and said he would go, brought his tall hat and his mountain-staff, like a long, strong cane, with a sharp iron at the end, which he can stick into the snow or ice if there is danger of slipping; and they went merrily on their way, over the green grass, over the rocks, far up among the snow and ice, and the frozen streams and rivers that pour down the mountain-sides.

Joseph was brave and gay; he led the way, singing aloud until the echoes answered from every hillside.  It makes one happy to sing, and when we are busy and happy we sing without thinking of it, as the birds do.  When everything is bright and beautiful in nature around us, we feel like singing aloud and praising God, who made the earth so beautiful; then the earth also seems to sing of God who made it, and the echo seems like its answer of praise.  Did you ever hear the echo,—­the voice that seems to come from a hill or a house far away, repeating whatever you may say?  Among the mountains the echoes answer each other again and again.  Jeannette has often heard them.