It was a fine, sunny May day when they reached the land again.  No time, though, for them to go Maying, for only see how much is to be done!  Here are all the trunks and the linen-chests, and all the children, too, to be disposed of, and they are to stop but two days in this city.  Then they must be ready for a long journey in the cars and steamboats, up rivers and across lakes, and sometimes for miles and miles through woods, where they see no houses nor people, excepting here and there a single log cabin with two or three ragged children at play outside, or a baby creeping over the doorstep, while farther on among the trees stands a man with his axe, cutting, with heavy blows, some tall trees into such logs as those of which the house is built.

These are new and strange sights to the children of the River Rhine.  They wonder, and often ask their parents if they, too, shall live in a little log house like that.

How fresh and fragrant the new logs are for the dwelling, and how sweet the pine and spruce boughs for a bed!  A good new log house in the green woods is the best home in the world.

Oh, how heartily tired they all are when at last they stop!  They have been riding by day and by night.  The children have fallen asleep with heads curled down upon their arms upon the seats of the car, and the mother has had very hard work to keep little Hans contented and happy.  But here at last they have stopped.  Here is the new home.

They have left the cars at a very small town.  It has ten or twelve houses and one store, and they have taken here a great wagon with three horses to carry them yet a few miles farther to a lonely, though beautiful place.  It is on the edge of a forest.  The trees are very tall, their trunks moss-covered; and when you look far in among them it is so dark that no sunlight seems to fall on the brown earth.  But outside is sunshine, and the young spring grass and wild flowers, different from those which grow on the Rhine banks.

But where is their house?

Here is indeed something new for them.  It is almost night; no house is near, and they have no sleeping-place but the great wagon.  But their cheerful mother packs them all away in the back part of the wagon, on some straw, covering them with shawls as well as she can, and bids them good-night, saying, “You can see the stars whenever you open your eyes.”

It is a new bed and a hard one.  However, the children are tired enough to sleep well; but they woke very early, as you or I certainly should if we slept in the great concert-hall of the birds.  Oh, how those birds of the woods did begin to sing, long before sunrise!  And Christian was out from his part of the bed in a minute, and off four miles to the store, to buy some bread for breakfast.

An hour after sunrise he was back again, and Louise had gathered sticks, of which her father made a bright fire.  And now the mother is teaching her little daughter how to make tea, and Fritz and Gretchen are poking long sticks into the ashes to find the potatoes which were hidden there to roast.