Page - 120 - in The Forest Farm - Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

But father was wagging the rosette under my nose: “And now, boy, perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell me where you got those fine feathers from! Are you walking out with somebody, young as you are? That’s what I want to know!” Many and sweet as were the thoughts of pretty girls that filled my mind, fond as I was of talking of it to fellows like myself, the thing looked very different in my father’s presence. I assured him that I was walking out with nobody and that I did not know who had given me the favour. He laughed out loud and then flew at me angrily because of “the silly impudence of trying to make him believe a fib like that.” My mother interposed and said that they could rejoice that I was home again, and that they must not begin by scolding me so hard. “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.