I do not like thunder storms--they frighten me for hours
before they come, because I always feel them on the way;
but it is odd that I should go for shelter to the garden.
I feel better there, more taken care of, more petted.
When it thunders, the April baby says, "There's lieber Gott scolding
those angels again." And once, when there was a storm in the night,
she complained loudly, and wanted to know why lieber Gott didn't
do the scolding in the daytime, as she had been so tight asleep.
They all three speak a wonderful mixture of German and English,
adulterating the purity of their native tongue by putting
in English words in the middle of a German sentence.
It always reminds me of Justice tempered by Mercy.
We have been cowslipping to-day in a little wood dignified by
the name of the Hirschwald, because it is the happy hunting-ground
of innumerable deer who fight there in the autumn evenings,
calling each other out to combat with bayings that ring through
the silence and send agreeable shivers through the lonely listener.
I often walk there in September, late in the evening, and sitting
on a fallen tree listen fascinated to their angry cries.

We made cowslip balls sitting on the grass. The babies had
never seen such things nor had imagined anything half so sweet.
The Hirschwald is a little open wood of silver birches and springy
turf starred with flowers, and there is a tiny stream meandering
amiably about it and decking itself in June with yellow flags.
I have dreams of having a little cottage built there,
with the daisies up to the door, and no path of any sort--
just big enough to hold myself and one baby inside and a purple
clematis outside. Two rooms--a bedroom and a kitchen.
How scared we would be at night, and how completely happy by day!