in the kitchen is covered with stew-pans and kettles, in which are
cooking dinners for the sick and the poor, and day after day, as the
dinner-hour draws near, Louise will come, and Fritz, and even little
Gretchen, saying: "Mother, may I go?" "May I go?" and the mother
answers: "Dear children, you shall all go together"; and she fills the
bowls and baskets, and sends her sunny-hearted children down into the
valley to old Hans the gardener, who has been lame with rheumatism so
many years; and to young Marie, the pale, thin girl, who was so merry
and rosy-cheeked in the vineyard a year ago; and to the old, old woman
with the brown, wrinkled face and bowed head, who sits always in the
sunshine before the door, and tries to knit; but the needles drop from
the poor trembling hands, and the stitches slip off, and she cannot
see to pick them up. She is too deaf to hear the children as they come
down the road, and she is nodding her poor old head, and feeling about
in her lap for the lost needle, when Louise, with her bright eyes,
spies it, picks it up, and before the old woman knows she has come,
a soft little hand is laid in the brown, wrinkled one, and the little
girl is shouting in her ear that she has brought some dinner from
mamma. It makes a smile shine in the old half-blind eyes. It is always
the happiest part of the day to her when the dear little lady comes
with her dinner. And it made Louise happy too, for nothing repays us
so well as what we do unselfishly for others.

These summer days are full of delight for the children. It is not all
play for them, to be sure; but then, work is often even more charming
than play, as I think some little girls know when they have been
helping their mothers,--running of errands, dusting the furniture,
and sewing little squares of patchwork that the baby may have a
cradle-quilt made entirely by her little sister.