Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. AnstrutherVon Arnim, Elizabeth
General
Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther
Von Arnim, Elizabeth
British -- Germany -- Fiction; Epistolary fiction; Germany -- Fiction; Love stories; Young women -- Fiction
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Our new address is Galgenberg, Jena,--rather grim,
but what's in a name? The thing itself is perfect. It is a tiny house,
white, with green shutters, on the south slope of the hill among
apple-trees. The garden is so steep that you can't sit down in it except
on the north side of the house, where you can because the house is there
to stop you from sliding farther. It is a strip of rough grass out of
which I shall make haycocks, with three apple-trees in it. There is also
a red currant bush, out of which I shall make jelly. At the bottom,
below the fence--rotten in places, but I'm going to mend that--begins a
real apple orchard, and through its leaves we can look down on the roof
of another house, white like ours, but a little bigger, and with blue
shutters instead of green. People take it for the summer, and once an
Englishman came and made a beanfield there--but I think I told you about
the beanfield. Behind us, right away up the slope, are pine trees that
brush restlessly backward and forward all day long across the clouds,
trying to sweep bits of clear blue in the sky, and at night spread
themselves out stiff and motionless against the stars. I saw them last
night from my window. We moved in yesterday. The moving in was not very
easy, because of what Papa calls the precipitous nature of the district.
He sat with his back propped against the wall of the house on the only
side on which, as I have explained, you can sit, and worked with a
pencil at his book about Goethe in Jena with perfect placidity while
Johanna and I and the man who urged the furniture cart up the hill kept
on stepping over his legs as we went in and out furnishing the house.
There was not much to furnish, which was lucky, there not being much to
furnish with. We have got rid of all superfluities, including the
canary, which I presented, its cage beautifully tied up with the blue
ribbons I wore at my first party, to the little girl with the
flame-colored hair on the second floor. As much of the other things as
any one could be induced to buy we sold, and we burnt what nobody would
buy or endure having given them. And so, pared down, we fit in here
quite nicely, and after a day or two conceded to the suavities of life,
such as the tacking up in appropriate places of muslin curtains and the
tying of them with bows, I intend to buy a spade and a watering-pot and
see what I can do with the garden.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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