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 yourself,” said Walden, “ I will take care of your infant.” Placing himself on the grass beside it, he dipped a bit of the loaf in the milk, and patiently assisted his little famished charge.

The child looked up in his face and smiled: Walden, pleased and affected at this intuitive mark of gratitude, kissed its little forehead.

“What is your occupation?” he asked the woman, who was eating with avidity; “you are, I suppose, the mother of this little creature : where do you live ?”

“No, it is not my own,” replied she, “and I did not know its parents. I am the wife of a poor soldier, my worthy sir, and I have travelled from beyond Berlin a great way; my husband had been away from me three years, and I wanted to see him again—for I loved him dearly. My own two little children I left with their grandmother, and I sold everything I did not absolutely want at home, that I might carry him a little trifle of money. Accordingly I set out, and got to the end of my journey just as my husband had marched with his corps to drive a party of Austrians from some little villa are: so when it was all over, and they had done what they had been ordered, I ran to the place to meet him.”

Here the poor woman burst into tears.