Three neat little maidens were seated in Mrs. Behrens' tidy parlour in Gürlitz parsonage on the same morning. They were plying their needles and tongues busily, for they were trying a race both in sewing and in talking, and as they sat there they looked as sweet and rosy in contrast with the white linen, as freshly plucked strawberries on a white plate. And these three children were Louisa Hawermann, and the twins, Lina and Mina Nüssler.--"Children," said little Mrs. Behrens, on one of the many incursions from the kitchen into the parlour, "you can't think what a pleasure it is to me in my old age when I am laying the clean linen away in the chest, that I know exactly when I spun and hemmed each separate piece! How differently one treats it when one knows from experience how much trouble it has cost. Mina, Mina, that hem's all crooked. Goodness gracious me, Louisa, I believe you've been going on sewing without ever looking what you were about, don't you see that you haven't got a knot on your thread! Now I must go and see that the potatoes are boiling properly, for my pastor will soon be in," and then she hastened from the room, only popping her head in at the door again to say, "Mina and Lina, you are to remain to dinner," and so she kept flying about between kitchen and parlour in measured time like the pendulum of a clock and keeping everything in good order in both. But how was it that Lina and Mina had joined Mrs. Behrens' sewing-class? This was how it happened--When the two little girls had grown so old that they could pronounce the letter "r," and no longer cared about playing with the sand-box, but ran after Mrs. Nüssler all day long, saying: "What shall we do now, mother?" Mrs. Nüssler told young Joseph that it was high time for the children to have some schooling: they must have a governess. Joseph had no objection, and his brother-in-law Baldrian the schoolmaster, was commissioned to engage one. When the governess had been six months at Rexow, Mrs. Nüssler said she was a discontented old woman who did nothing but nagg at the children all day long, and made her so uncomfortable that she scarcely felt at home in her own house. So that governess had to take her departure.--Kurz, the shop-keeper, chose the next, and one day, when no one in Rexow had any suspicion of what was going to happen, the door opened, and in marched an enormous woman, as tall as a grenadier, with strongly marked eye-brows, a yellow complexion, and spectacles on her nose, who introduced herself as the "new governess." She then began to speak French to the two little girls, and finding that they were innocent of all knowledge of that language, she addressed herself to young Joseph in the same tongue. Such a thing had never happened to young Joseph before, and it astonished him so much that he let his pipe go out, and as they were drinking coffee at the time, he said, in order to say something: "Mother, fill the new teacher's cup."--Well, in a