"Muchel, you point too far," said the lady shortly; "all that over yonder belongs to Pumpelhagen." "You are right, that is all Pumpelhagen. But"--he added, and the little eyes looked greedily towards Pumpelhagen, "who knows? If God spares my life, and I sell my property in Pomerania at a good bargain, and times continue good, and the old Kammerrath dies, and his son gets into debt----" "Yes, Muchel," interrupted his wife, and across her face flitted that derisive gleam, which was the only approach to a smile ever seen on it, "yes, just as old Strohpagel said: 'If I were ten years younger, and hadn't this lame leg, and hadn't a wife--you should see what a fellow I would be!'" "Häuhning," said Pomuchelskopp, making a face as if he were grieved to the heart, "how can you talk so? As if I wished to be rid of you! Without the thirty thousand dollars, which your father left you, I never could have bought Gurlitz. And what a fine estate Gurlitz is! See! this is all Gurlitz!" and he pointed again over the fields. "Yes, Kopp," said his wife, in a hard tone, "all but the Pastor's field, which you have let slip out of your fingers." "Ah, Klücking," said Pomuchelskopp, as they left the garden, "always the Pastor's field! what can I do? See, I am an honest, straight-forward man; what can I do against such a pair of sly old fellows as Habermann and the Pastor? But the day is not over yet, Monsieur Habermann! We shall have something to say to each other yet, Herr Pastor!" At the Pastor's house, this morning, three pretty little girls were sitting in the Frau Pastorin's neat parlor, busy as bees, their fingers sewing and their tongues chatting at the same time, and looking, amid the white linen, as fresh and red as ripe strawberries on a white plate; these were Louise Habermann and the little twins, Mining and Lining Nüssler. "Children," said the little, round Frau Pastorin, as she now and then looked in from the kitchen, "you cannot think what a pleasure it is to one in my old age, when I put away my clean linen in the linen-trunk, and think with every piece when it was spun and when it was sewed! And how prudent it makes one, to know for oneself how much pains it has cost! Mining, Mining, your seam is crooked! Good heavens, Louise! I believe you are looking off half the time, yet you sew right along, and get no knots in your thread. But now I must go and take up the potatoes, for my Pastor will be here soon," and with that she ran out of the door, looking back, however, to say, "Mining and Lining, you must stay here to dinner to-day!" And so she flew from the kitchen to the parlor, and from the parlor back to the kitchen, like the pendulum of a clock, and kept everything in running order. But how came Lining and Mining Nüssler to be in the Frau Pastorin's sewing-school? It happened in this way.