it thoughtfully for a few seconds, and then said, "Are you the
child who lives up with Alm-Uncle, are you Heidi?"
"Yes, yes," answered Heidi, "I have just come down in the sleigh
with grandfather."
"Is it possible! Why your hands are quite warm! Brigitta, did Alm-
Uncle come himself with the child?"
Peter's mother had left her work and risen from the table and
now stood looking at Heidi with curiosity, scanning her from head
to foot. "I do not know, mother, whether Uncle came himself; it
is hardly likely, the child probably makes a mistake."
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 eyes 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.
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