Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: gather them at the rate of three dollars a year. The cart soon finds this out, and it begins to cry in its sharpest tones, ‘Baldine! think of Baldine, Feather- helm !’ Then I take a firmer hold of it, and my sight grows clear again. All is for the best. Only one must learn to understand it, be it dumb, or cry it never so loudly! Thus the time passed away for Baldine in asking and hearing, till the day came when the cart again shrieked up the hedgeway. Then, after many long and longer days, it came crying back again. And so things went on variably till the summer was over. During the winter the cart slept its winter sleep. Featherhelm cut and carved and hammered and glued his treasure-troves together, and Baldine sat looking and listening. When-spring came, the first cuckoo and the cart cried together in the forest quarter, but the cuckoo’s voice was the soonest tired. Baldine still hears the cart when the grandfather has disappeared below the upland, while the cuckoo has long been silent. She knows now that the good cart cries for the grandfather. She knows also that other dumb things have their language; only one must find it out, as the grandfather said. She no longer asks
Why ? of all the silent things and dumb animals. She looks at them a long time, and then she knows it of her own accord. She has watched the squirrels in the tops of the pine-trees; and since then she understands very well what the sunbeams are about. They play, just as the squirrels do. All the golden lights climb up and downthe stems, spring for pure merriment from bough to bough, and hide themselves in the tree-tops covered with leaves, through which only a lurking sparklet peeps pertly here and there. Then they chase one another from one tree to another, and scamper like mad across the clearing. …
