Page:Robins - My Little Sister.djvu/14

2 think I imagined the confused picture of dark faces and a ship.

My first clear impression of the world is the same as Bettina's. A house, which we did not yet know as small, set in a place which still is wide and green.

As far back as we remember it at all, we remember roaming this expanse; always, in the beginning, with our mother. A region where we played with the infinite possibilities of existence from the discovery of a wheat-ears' hidden nest, to the apparition of a pack of hounds on the horizon, followed by men in red coats and ladies in sober habit, on horses that came galloping out of the vague, up over the green rim of the world, jumping the five-barred gate into Little Klaus's meadow, and vanishing in a pleasant fanfare of horn, of baying and hallooing, leaving us standing there in a stirred and wonderful stillness.

We seldom met anyone afoot in those days except, now and then, the cottager who lived in a thatched hut down in one of the multitude of hollows. We called him "Kleiner Klaus," because he had one horse of his own, and because sometimes in the paddock four others grazed and