Page - 94 - in The Forest Farm - Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

XI About Kickel, who went to Prison YOU were on for a bit of gipsying, were you, Peterkin? Home, everlastingly home, isn’t very cheerful—always having the green-glazed mug to drink from, always having your face wiped over by the mother with a wet rag, always having to sleep in the little box-bed by the stove—it’s no fun! One can’t help wanting sometimes to gather a dinner from the whortleberry plants and drink from the brook, to roll on the ground sometimes, and even to walk about in mud; and now and again one wants to sleep in an old hay barn, with water never seen before rushing along outside, in an unknown gorge, with quite strange trees standing in the red sunshine when you wake up in the morning, and unknown people mowing the grass in the meadows. Suppose you long for this, and then your father forbids it! “Children belong at home!” And, “After school, you will come home by the shortest way!” The shortest way! There isn’t such a thing in our high lands, especially if Zutrum Simmerl is in school, and if Zutrum Simmerl says, “Peterl, come with me; at home, in Zutrumshaus, there are all sorts of jolly things; a spotted white yard- dog, who’s got puppies; cherry-trees, which are all just red and black; and behind the house is a charcoal-burner’s hut with straw that one can lie on, and in the stream you can catch trout and crayfish with your hand, which your mother can bake and cook afterwards.” The Zutrum family were far-away cousins of ours, so that when young Cousin Simmerl said “Come with me,” one naturally went. It was a whole hour’s walk from my parents’ house there, and as the school where we, from Alpel and Trabachgraben, met together, lay just half-way, the world became stranger and stranger to me with each step of my way to Zutrum. And when the sun sank down over the black saddle of the wooded range, and the sycamores threw long shadows across the newly mown meadows, I felt very strange. The hay smelt, the grasshoppers chirped, the frogs quacked as they did at home, but all else was different, the mountains much steeper, the coombs much deeper. I was oppressed. We looked down at last on the grey shingled roofs of the farm, from whose whitewashed chimneys thin smoke