"Now you're backing him in his wickedness," he cried, "when he's lying straight in my face! But did you ever see such a booby as not to know from whom he got the ribbons in his hat?" "Now it's my turn to laugh," said my mother. "This time the boy really can't tell, for _I_ had the favour stuck in his hat on the sly, so that he might have a bit of colour about him, as good as the rest of them." She had done it secretly, because she suspected that her son was longing for a rosette from strange hands, and could easily have despised his mother's gift. She had prevented his ingratitude beforehand. And her home-coming son might have smitten her to the heart with that same rosette!... The murder was out; father said nothing; and I ... I also did my share of thinking.... That children must always be striving after strange and far-away joys, hungering for love and yearning for love, which they will never find so pure and rich and endless as at home, in that perennial spring of tenderness, their mother's heart! FOOTNOTES: [14] Peter Rosegger was at that time a travelling tailor's apprentice. [15] Lorenz, Lawrence. XIV A Forgotten Land I always say that the world is becoming too small. There is no room left for hermits. I frequently receive enquiries, from correspondents abroad, for cool summer resorts,--for nature resorts. Would I please--so runs the request--suggest a corner in the Alps where they will find clean rooms and good food in a farm-house kept by simple, kindly people. Added conditions: no railway, no telegraph, no post, no newspapers. A place where they can feel safe from meeting English people or people from Berlin and--forgive the imputation--Vienna. They want to have nothing but woods and fields around them, and, oblivious of all town luxuries and refinements, at least for a few weeks to bathe body and soul in the dew of a primitive life. This is the wish which--O curious sign of the times!--grows ever louder and louder. Is the return to nature, yearned for by the poets, at last beginning in earnest? If only the company-promoters do not seize upon this need and found a colony for hermits! It is not so easy to recover nature once wantonly deserted. Our alps contain no valley, however secluded, into which artificial wines and brandy and American meat-extracts and cigars have not by this time made their way, in which the fences are bare of railway timetables and mineral-water posters and upon which some _News of the Day_ or other does not force its huge weekly doses of "culture" and information. This is the case by now even in those districts whose "unfavourable" situation has hitherto for the most part spared them the two well-known "blessings" of civilisation. The floodgates are opened; and even those parts cannot be spared the deluge....