What Sami Sings with the Birds | Page 3

with him and help.
Mary Ann had scarcely stepped into her little room and put on her house dress, to prepare her supper, when she heard some one coming along with hurried footsteps. The door was quickly thrown open and in stepped her son Sami with a very distressed face. Under his arm he carried a bundle wrapped up in one of Marietta's aprons. This he laid on the table, threw himself down and sobbed aloud, with his head in his arms:
"It is all over, mother, all over; Marietta is dead!"
"Oh, for Heaven's sake, what are you saying?" cried his mother in the greatest horror. "Oh, Sami, is it possible?"
Then she lifted Sami gently and continued in a trembling voice:
"Come, sit down beside me and tell me all about it. Is she really dead? Oh, when did it happen? How did it come so quickly?"
Sami willingly dropped down on a chair beside his mother. But then he buried his face in his hands and went on sobbing again.
"Oh, I can't bear it, I must go away, mother, I can't bear it here any longer, it is all over!"
"Oh, Sami, where would you go?" said his mother, weeping. "We have already come over the mountains, where would you go from here?"
"I must go across the water, as far as I possibly can, I can't stay here any longer. I cannot, mother," declared Sami. "I must go across the great water as far as possible!"
"Oh, not that!" cried Mary Ann. "Don't be so rash! Wait a little, until you can think more calmly; it will seem different to you."
"No, mother, no, I must go away. I am forced to it; I can't do any different," cried Sami, almost wild.
His mother looked at him in terror, but she said nothing more. She seemed to hear her father saying: "It can't be helped. He takes it from his grandfather." And with a sigh she said:
"It will have to be so."
Then there sounded from the bundle a strange peeping, exactly as if a chicken were smothering inside. "What have you put in the bundle, Sami?" asked the mother, going towards it, to loosen the firmly tied apron.
"That's so, I had almost forgotten it, mother," replied Sami, wiping his eyes, "I have brought the little boy to you, I don't know what to do with it."
"Oh, how could you pack him up so! Yes, yes, you poor little thing," said the grandmother soothingly, taking the diminutive Sami out of one wrapping and then a second and a third.
The father Sami had wrapped the little baby first in its clothes, then in a shawl, and then in the apron as tight as possible, so that it couldn't slip out on the way, and fall on the ground. When little Sami was freed from the smothering wrappings and could move his arms and legs he fought with all his limbs in the air and screamed so pitifully that his grandmother thought it seemed exactly as if he already knew what a great misfortune had come to him.
But father Sami said perhaps he was hungry, for since the evening before no one had paid any attention to the little baby. This seemed to the sympathetic Mary Ann quite too cruel, and she realised that if she didn't care for the poor little mite it would die. She wrapped him up again carefully in his blanket, but not around his head, and carried him upright on her arm, not under it, as one carries a bundle. Then she ran all around her room to collect milk, a dish and fire together, so that the starving little creature might have some nourishment. As she sat on her stool, and the little one eagerly sipped the milk, while his tiny little hand tightly clasped his grandmother's forefinger like a life-preserver, she said, greatly touched:
"Yes, indeed, you little Sami, you poor little orphan, I will do what I can for you and the dear Lord will not forsake us."
And to the big Sami she said:
"I will keep him, but don't take any rash steps! In the first great sorrow many a one does what he later regrets. See, you can't run away from sorrow, it runs with you. Stay and bear what the dear Lord sends. He is not angry with you. Hold to him still in time of sorrow, then the sun will shine tomorrow! It will be the same with you as it has been with so many others." Sami had listened in silence, but like one who does not understand what he hears.
"Good night, mother! May God reward you for what you do for the boy," he said then, after wiping his eyes again. Then he pressed his mother's hand, and went out of the door.
CHAPTER SECOND
AT THE GRANDMOTHER'S
Old Mary Ann