Page:The grandmother; a story of country life in Bohemia.pdf/173

Rh ing toward the meadow that leads to the mill.

From the village inn, across the creek, Grandmother saw a woman running, her shoulders covered with a white wrap. Now she stands and listens, like a fawn that has run out into the open meadow to feed awhile. All is quiet except the song of the nightingale, the rumbling of the mill, the murmuring of the waves under the dark alder bushes. She binds the white wrap upon her right arm and gathers nine different kinds of flowers. Having her bouquet ready, she bends, washes her face with the fresh dew, and turning neither to the right nor to the left, hastens back to the inn. "It is Christina! she is going to make St. John's wreath; I thought she was fond of that youth," said Grandmother, never turning her eyes from the girl. She is now out of sight, and Grandmother remains standing buried in a deep revery.

She sees before herself a meadow, a mountain village, above her the moon and glittering stars; they are the same stars, the same moon, ever young, never changing, and eternally beautiful. She, too, was young when on that St. John's eve she made that fatal wreath of nine kinds of flowers. Grandmother remembers as if it were now, how afraid she was lest some one should meet her and spoil her charm. She sees herself in her chamber, she sees her bed covered with the flowers, she remembers how she placed the wreath under her pillow, how fervently she prayed that God would send her a dream in which she should see him whom her soul had chosen. Her confidence in the fatal wreath was not misplaced: she saw in her