It was a good place to be born in. When she was a baby she used to lie
on the short, sweet grass before the doorstep, and watch the cows
and the goats feeding, and clap her little hands to see how rosy the
sunset made the snow that shone on the tops of those high peaks. And
the next summer, when she could run alone, she picked the blue-eyed
gentians, thrusting her small fingers between their fringed eyelids,
and begging them to open and look at little Jean; and she stained her
wee hands among the strawberries, and pricked them with the thorns
of the long raspberry-vines, when she went with her mother in the
afternoon to pick the sweet fruit for supper. Ah, she was a happy
little thing! Many a fall she got over the stones or among the brown
moss, and many a time the clean frock that she wore was dyed red with
the crushed berries; but, oh, how pleasant it was to find them in
great patches on the mountain-side, where the kind sun had warmed them
into such delicious life! I have seen the children run out of school
to pick such sweet wild strawberries, all the recess-time, up in the
fields of Maine; and how happy they were with their little stained
fingers as they came back at the call of the bell!

In the black bog-mud grew the Alpen roses, and her mother said, "Do
not go there, my little daughter, it is too muddy for you." But at
night, when her brother came home from the chamois hunt, he took off
his tall, pointed hat, and showed his little sister the long spray of
roses twisted round it, which he had brought for her. He could go in
the mud with his thick boots, you know, and never mind it.

Here they live alone upon the mountain; there are no near neighbors.
At evening they can see the blue smoke curling from the chimney of one
house that stands behind that sunny green slope, a hundred yards from