HEIDI
But Heidi looked steadily at the woman, not at all as if in any uncertainty, and said, “I know quite well who wrapped me in my bedcover and brought me down in the sleigh: it was grandfather.”
“There was some truth then perhaps in what Peter used to tell us of Alm-Uncle during the summer, when we thought he must be wrong,” said grandmother; “but who would ever have believed that such a thing was possible? I did not think the child would live three weeks up there. What is she like, Brigitta?”
The latter had so thoroughly examined Heidi on all sides that she was well able to describe her to her mother.
“She has Adelaide’s slenderness of figure, but her eves are dark and her hair curly like her father’s and the old man’s up there: she takes after both of them, I think.”
Heidi meanwhile had not been idle; she had made the round of the room and looked carefully at everything there was to be seen. All of a sudden she exclaimed, “Grandmother, one of your shutters is flapping backwards and forwards; grandfather would put a nail in and make it all right in a minute, or else it will break one of the panes some day; look, look, how it keeps on banging!”
“Ah, dear child,” said the old woman, “I am not able to see it, but I can hear that and many other things besides the shutter. Everything about the place rattles and creaks when the wind is blowing, and it gets inside through all the cracks and holes. The house is going to pieces, and in the night, when the two others are asleep, I often lie awake in fear and trembling, thinking that the whole place will give way and fall and
[72]
