Small as the house was, it was large enough for two people who lived in it.  I want to tell you a story today about these two people.  One was an old gray-haired woman, so old that the little children of the village, nearly half a mile away, often wondered whether she had come into the world with the huge mountains and the giant fir trees, which stood like giants back of her small hut.  Her face was wrinkled all over with deep lines, which, if the children could only have read aright, would have told them of many years of cheerful, happy, self-sacrifice; of loving, anxious, watching beside sick-beds; of quiet endurance of pain, of many a day of hunger and cold, and of a thousand deeds of unselfish love for other people; but, of course, they could not read this strange handwriting.  They only knew that she was old and wrinkled, and that she stooped as she walked.  None of them seemed to fear her, for her smile was always cheerful, and she had a kindly word for each of them if they chanced to meet her on her way to and from the village.  With this old, old woman lived a very little girl.  So bright and happy was she that the travellers who passed by the lonesome little house on the edge of the forest often thought of a sunbeam as they saw her.  These two people were known in the village as Granny Goodyear and Little Gretchen.

The winter had come and the frost had snapped off many of the smaller branches of the pine trees in the forest.  Gretchen and her granny were up by daybreak each morning.  After their simple breakfast of oatmeal, Gretchen would run to the little closet and fetch Granny’s old woolen shawl, which seemed almost as old as Granny herself.  Gretchen always claimed the right to put the shawl over Granny’s head, even though she had to climb onto the wooden bench to do it.  After carefully pinning it under Granny’s chin, she gave her a good-bye kiss, and Granny started out for her morning’s work in the forest.  This work was nothing more nor less than the gathering up of the twigs and branches which the autumn winds and winter frosts had thrown upon the ground.  These were carefully gathered into a large bundle which Granny tied together with a strong linen band.  She then managed to lift the bundle to her shoulder and trudged off to the village with it.  Here she sold the fagots for kindling wood to the people of the village.  Sometimes she would get only a few pence each day, and sometimes a dozen or more, but on this money little Gretchen and she managed to live; they had their home, and the forest kindly furnished the wood for the fire which kept them warm in winter.