bowed head, who sits always in the sunshine before the door, and tries to knit; but the needles drop from the poor trembling hands, and the stitches slip off, and she cannot see to pick them up.  She is too deaf to hear the children as they come down the road, and she is nodding her poor old head, and feeling about in her lap for the lost needle, when Louise, with her bright eyes, spies it, picks it up, and before the old woman knows she has come, a soft little hand is laid in the brown, wrinkled one, and the little girl is shouting in her ear that she has brought some dinner from mamma.  It makes a smile shine in the old half-blind eyes.  It is always the happiest part of the day to her when the dear little lady comes with her dinner.  And it made Louise happy too, for nothing repays us so well as what we do unselfishly for others.

These summer days are full of delight for the children.  It is not all play for them, to be sure; but then, work is often even more charming than play, as I think some little girls know when they have been helping their mothers,—­running of errands, dusting the furniture, and sewing little squares of patchwork that the baby may have a cradle-quilt made entirely by her little sister.

Louise can knit, and, indeed, every child and woman in that country knits.  You would almost laugh to see how gravely the little girl takes out her stocking, for she has really begun her first stocking, and sits on the piazza-steps for an hour every morning at work.  Then the little garden, which she calls her own, must be weeded.  The gardener would gladly do it, but Louise has a hoe of her own, which her father bought in the spring, and, bringing it to his little daughter, said:  “Let me see how well my little girl can take care of her own garden.”  And the child has tried very hard; sometimes, it is true, she would let the weeds grow pretty high before they were pulled up, but, on the whole, the garden promises well, and there are buds on her moss-rose bush.  It is good to take care of a garden, for, besides the pleasure the flowers can bring us, we learn how watchful we must be to root out the weeds, and how much trimming and care the plants need; so we learn how to watch over our own hearts.

She has books, too, and studies a little each day,—­studies at home with her mother, for there is no school near enough for her to go to it, and while she and Fritz are so young, their mother teaches them, while Christian, who is already more than twelve years old, has gone to the school upon that beautiful hill which can be seen from Louise’s chamber window,—­the school where a hundred boys and girls are studying music.  For, ever since he was a baby, Christian has loved music; he has sung the very sweetest little songs to Louise, while she was yet so young as to lie in her cradle, and he has whistled until the birds among the bushes would answer him again, and now, when he comes home from school to spend some long summer Sunday, he always brings the flute, and plays, as I told you in the beginning of the story.