Were there not too many golden memories hanging about the old place for them to leave it?
Long winter nights, when they had sat round the fire and roasted potatoes, and asked riddles, and the old man had told of the little German village, where, fifty years before, a little German boy had played at snowballs, and had carried home the knitted stockings of a little girl who afterward became Waldo's mother; did they not seem to see the German peasant girls walking about with their wooden shoes and yellow, braided hair, and the little children eating their suppers out of little wooden bowls when the good mothers called them in to have their milk and potatoes?
And were there not yet better times than these?
Moonlight nights, when they romped about the door, with the old man, yet more a child than any of them, and laughed, till the old roof of the wagon-house rang?
Or, best of all, were there not warm, dark, starlight nights, when they sat together on the doorstep, holding each other's hands, singing German hymns, their voices rising clear in the still night air--till the German would draw away his hand suddenly to wipe quickly a tear the children must not see?
Would they not sit looking up at the stars and talking of them--of the dear Southern Cross, red, fiery Mars, Orion, with his belt, and the Seven Mysterious Sisters--and fall to speculating over them?
How old are they?
Who dwelt in them?
And the old German would say that perhaps the souls we loved lived in them; there, in that little twinkling point was perhaps the little girl whose stockings he had carried home; and the children would look up at it lovingly, and call it "Uncle Otto's star." Then they would fall to deeper speculations--of the times and seasons wherein the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll, and the stars shall fall as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, and there shall be time no longer: "When the Son of man shall come in His glory, and all His holy angels with Him." In lower and lower tones they would talk, till at last they fell into whispers; then they would wish good night softly, and walk home hushed and quiet.
Tonight, when Lyndall looked in, Waldo sat before the fire watching a pot which simmered there, with his slate and pencil in his hand; his father sat at the table buried in the columns of a three-weeks-old newspaper; and the stranger lay stretched on the bed in the corner, fast asleep, his mouth open, his great limbs stretched out loosely, betokening much weariness.

The girl put the rations down upon the table, snuffed the candle, and stood looking at the figure on the bed.
"Uncle Otto," she said presently, laying her hand down on the newspaper, and causing the old German to look up over his glasses, "how long did that man say he had been walking ?" "Since this morning, poor fellow! A gentleman--not accustomed to walking--horse died--poor fellow!" said the German, pushing out his lip and glancing commiseratingly over his spectacles in the direction of the bed where the stranger lay, with his flabby double chin, and broken boots through which the flesh shone.
"And do you believe him, Uncle Otto ?" "Believe him?
why of course I do.

He himself told me the story three times distinctly." "If," said the girl slowly, "he had walked for only one day his boots would not have looked so; and if--" "If!" said the German starting up in his chair, irritated that any one should doubt such irrefragable evidence--"if! Why, he told me himself! Look how he lies there," added the German pathetically, "worn out--poor fellow! We have something for him though," pointing with his forefinger over his shoulder to the saucepan that stood on the fire.

"We are not cooks--not French cooks, not quite; but it's drinkable, drinkable, I think; better than nothing, I think," he added, nodding his head in a jocund manner that evinced his high estimation of the contents of the saucepan and his profound satisfaction therein.

"Bish! bish! my chicken," he said, as Lyndall tapped her little foot up and down upon the floor.