When the maidens of Dosenheim, going out to wash clothes in the morning at the river, called her the _heathen_, she mirrored herself complacently in the fountain, and when she had admired her own long dark tresses, her violet lips, her white teeth, her necklace of red berries, she would smile and murmur to herself-- "Ah! they only call me a heathen because I am prettier than they are," and she would dip the tip of her little foot in the fountain and laugh. But Catherine could not approve of such conduct, and said-- "Myrtle is not the least good to us. She won't do a single thing that is useful. It is no use for me to preach, and advise, and scold, she does everything the wrong way. The other day, when we were stowing away apples in the closet, she took bites out of the best to see if they were ripe! She has no pleasure but in gobbling up the best of everything." Bremer himself could not help admitting that there was a very heathenish spirit in her when he heard his wife crying from morning till night, "Myrtle, Myrtle! where are you now? Ah, naughty, bad girl! she has run away into the woods again to gather blackberries." But still he laughed to himself, and pitied poor Catherine, whom he compared to a hen with a brood of ducklings. Every year after harvest-time Fritz and Myrtle spent whole days far away from the farm, pasturing the cattle, singing, and whistling, and baking potatoes under the ashes, and coming down the rocky hill in the evening blowing the shepherd's horn. These were some of Myrtle's happiest days. Seated before the burning hemp-stalks, with her pretty brown face between her hands, she lost herself in endless reveries. The long strings of wild ducks and geese which traverse, about the end of autumn, the boundless heavens spread from the mountains on the east to the western hills, seemed to have a depressing effect upon her mind. She used to follow them with longing eyes, straining them as if to overtake the wild birds in the immeasurable distance; and suddenly she would rise, spread out her arms, and cry-- "I must go! I must go! I can't stay!" Then she would weep with her head bowed down, and Fritz, seeing her in tears, would cry too, asking-- "Why do you cry, Myrtle? Has anybody hurt you? Is it any of the boys in the village?--Kasper, Wilhelm, Heinrich? Only tell me, and I will knock him down at once! Do tell!" "No; it is not that." "Well, why are you crying?" "I don't know." "Do you want to run as far as the Falberg?" "No; that is not far enough." "Where do you want to go?" "Down there! down there! ever so far! where the birds are going." This made Fritz open his eyes and his mouth very wide.