Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim Read Free Book Online Page B

beautiful, refined face, and her eyes and straight, fine eyebrows are particularly lovable. At meals she dips her bread into the salt-cellar, bites a bit off, and repeats the process, although providence (taking my shape) has caused salt-spoons to be placed at convenient intervals down the table. She lunched to-day on beer, Schweine-koteletten, and cabbage-salad with caraway seeds in it, and now I hear her through the open window, extemporising touching melodies in her charming, cooing voice. She is thin, frail, intelligent, and lovable, all on the above diet. What better proof can be needed to establish the superiority of the Teuton than the fact that after such meals he can produce such music? Cabbage salad is a horrid invention, but I don't doubt its utility as a means of encouraging thoughtfulness; nor will I quarrel with it, since it results so poetically, any more than I quarrel with the manure that results in roses, and I give it to Irais every day to make her sing. She is the sweetest singer I have ever heard, and has a charming trick of making up songs as she goes along. When she begins, I go and lean out of the window and look at my little friends out there in the borders while listening to her music, and feel full of pleasant sadness and regret. It is so sweet to be sad when one has nothing to be sad about.
    The April baby came panting up just as I had written that, the others hurrying along behind, and with flaming cheeks displayed for my admiration three brand-new kittens, lean and blind, that she was carrying in her pinafore, and that had just been found motherless in the woodshed.
    "Look," she cried breathlessly, "such a much!"
    I was glad it was only kittens this time, for she had been once before this afternoon on purpose, as she informed me, sitting herself down on the grass at my feet, to ask about the lieber Gott, it being Sunday and her pious little nurse's conversation having run, as it seems, on heaven and angels.
    Her questions about the lieber Gott are better left unrecorded, and I was relieved when she began about the angels.
    "What do they wear for clothes?" she asked in her German-English.
    "Why, you've seen them in pictures," I answered, "in beautiful, long dresses, and with big, white wings." "Feathers?" she asked.
    "I suppose so,--and long dresses, all white and beautiful."
    "Are they girlies?"
    "Girls? Ye--es."
    "Don't boys go into the Himmel?"
    "Yes, of course, if they're good."
    "And then what do
they
wear?" "Why, the same as all the other angels, I suppose."
    "Dwesses?"
    She began to laugh, looking at me sideways as though she suspected me of making jokes. "What a funny Mummy!" she said, evidently much amused. She has a fat little laugh that is very infectious.
    "I think," said I, gravely, "you had better go and play with the other babies."
    She did not answer, and sat still a moment watching the clouds. I began writing again.
    "Mummy," she said presently.
    "Well?"
    "Where do the angels get their dwesses?"
    I hesitated. "From lieber Gott," I said.
    "Are there shops in the Himmel?"
    "Shops? No."
    "But, then, where does lieber Gott buy their dwesses?"
    "Now run away like a good baby; I'm busy."
    "But you said yesterday, when I asked about lieber Gott, that you would tell about Him on Sunday, and it is Sunday. Tell me a story about Him."
    There was nothing for it but resignation, so I put down my pencil with a sigh. "Call the others, then."
    She ran away, and presently they all three emerged from the bushes one after the other, and tried all together to scramble on to my knee. The April baby got the knee as she always seems to get everything, and the other two had to sit on the grass.
    I began about Adam and Eve, with an eye to future parsonic probings. The April baby's eyes opened wider and wider, and her face grew redder and redder. I was surprised at the breathless interest she took in the story-- the other two were tearing up tufts of grass and hardly listening. I had scarcely got to the