All these sprang into vision as he read, till the landscape, concentrated, and expressing itself in its tiny central point of human interest, grew more real in memory and meaning than many with which he was himself familiar.
Yet that description was written by an untrained girl not yet seventeen years of age.

But with such from first to last, and this was by no means the best of them, he found her pages studded.
Then, jotted down from day to day, came the account of the illness and death of her twin sister, Gudrun, a pitiful tale to read.

Hopes, prayers, agonies of despair, all were here recorded; the last scene also was set out with a plain and noble dignity, written by the bed of death in the presence of death.

Now under the hand of suffering the child had become a woman, and, as was fitting, her full soul found relief in deeper notes.

"Good-bye, Gudrun," she ended, "my heart is broken; but I will mourn for you no more.