![]() ‘Goodbye to you then, and to you too, Heidi,’ she called, as she turned quickly away and started to descend the mountain at a running pace, which she did not slacken till she found herself safely again at Dorfli, for some inward agitation drove her forwards as if a steam-engine was at work inside her. He looked at her in a way that made her draw back a step or two, then flinging out his arm, he said to her in a commanding voice: ‘Be off with you this instant, and get back as quickly as you can to the place whence you came, and do not let me see your face again in a hurry.’ĭete did not wait to be told twice. As she uttered her last words, Uncle rose from his seat. Now Dete was not quite easy in her own conscience about what she was doing, and consequently was feeling hot and irritable, and said more than she had intended. You will be answerable for the result if harm happens to her, though you have hardly need, I should think, to add to the burden already on your conscience.’ If you cannot arrange to keep her, do with her as you like. Now I have to go and look after my own earnings, and you are the next of kin to the child. ‘I know I had to put up with her without complaint when she was left on my hands as an infant, and with enough to do as it was for my mother and myself. ‘And when the child begins to fret and whine after you, as is the way with these unreasonable little beings, what am I to do with her then?’ ‘That’s it, is it?’ said the old man, as he looked at her with a flash in his eye. ‘I have, I think, done my duty by her for these four years, and now it is time for you to do yours.’ ‘The child is here to remain with you,’ Dete made answer. Peter obeyed on the instant and quickly disappeared, for the old man had given him a look that made him feel that he did not want to stay any longer. ‘You there,’ he then called out to Peter, ‘be off with your goats, you are none too early as it is, and take mine with you.’ Source: NYPL.‘And what has the child to do with me up here?’ asked the old man curtly. You will hardly recognize her, as you have never seen her since she was a year old.’ From Heidi, Philadelphia David McKay Company 1922 edition. ‘I wish you good-day, Uncle,’ said Dete, as she walked towards him, ‘and I have brought you Tobias and Adelaide’s child. Meanwhile Dete had come up, with Peter after her, and the latter now stood still a while to watch what was going on. Heidi stared steadily back at him in return with unflinching gaze, for the grandfather, with his long beard and thick grey eyebrows that grew together over his nose and looked just like a bush, was such a remarkable appearance, that Heidi was unable to take her eyes off him. ‘So, so, what is the meaning of this?’ he asked gruffly, as he gave the child an abrupt shake of the hand, and gazed long and scrutinizingly at her from under his bushy eyebrows. While Heidi has captured the hearts of readers around the world, it is first her abrasive grandfather that she must charm. ![]() It is there in the Alps that her most famous character Heidi lives. As an adult living in Zurich, she began to write about life in the Swiss countryside where she grew up. ![]() This review has been corrected to remove an extraneous word.On 12 June 1827, a Swiss writer named Johanna Spyri was born. ![]() O’Shea comes across as a charming, ever-curious, and knowledgeable raconteur, but the book never seems sure of its purpose and suffers as a result. Unfortunately, O’Shea’s approach to elucidating regional history can be rather too cursory, and his prose style aspires to the scale and grandeur of the Alps without reaching such heights. O’Shea is at his best when describing the architectural marvels of the places he visits, its literary trivia (for example, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1816 in a French hamlet near Mont Blanc during a period of inclement weather she endured with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron), and such folkways as yodeling. The travelogue is chock-full of colorful facts, such as that “going to Switzerland” is “European shorthand for seeking assisted suicide” and that a Chinese mining magnate created a “clone” of the Austrian village of Hallstatt in China, which led to an explosion of Chinese tourism in the original town. ![]() In the summer of 2014, popular historian O’Shea ( The Friar of Carcassonne) traversed six of Europe’s seven alpine countries (France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia he missed Liechtenstein), aiming to share stories grounded in the cleavages of human geography that have long marked the region. ![]()
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