string of onions. The bed was in another corner, covered by a patchwork
quilt of faded red lions, and divided from the rest of the room by a blue
curtain, now drawn back. On the mantelshelf was an endless assortment of
little bags and stones; and on the wall hung a map of South Germany, with a
red line drawn through it to show where the German had wandered. This
place was the one home the girls had known for many a year. The house
where Tant Sannie lived and ruled was a place to sleep in, to eat in, not
to be happy in. It was in vain she told them they were grown too old to go
there; every morning and evening found them there. Were there not too many
golden memories hanging about the old place for them to leave it?

Long winter nights, when they had sat round the fire and roasted potatoes,
and asked riddles, and the old man had told of the little German village,
where, fifty years before, a little German boy had played at snowballs, and
had carried home the knitted stockings of a little girl who afterward
became Waldo's mother; did they not seem to see the German peasant girls
walking about with their wooden shoes and yellow, braided hair, and the
little children eating their suppers out of little wooden bowls when the
good mothers called them in to have their milk and potatoes?

And were there not yet better times than these? Moonlight nights, when
they romped about the door, with the old man, yet more a child than any of
them, and laughed, till the old roof of the wagon-house rang?

Or, best of all, were there not warm, dark, starlight nights, when they sat
together on the doorstep, holding each other's hands, singing German hymns,
their voices rising clear in the still night air--till the German would
draw away his hand suddenly to wipe quickly a tear the children must not
see? Would they not sit looking up at the stars and talking of them--of
the dear Southern Cross, red, fiery Mars, Orion, with his belt, and the