Bremer 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.