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And after all, nothing came up. The labour of digging and watering, the anxious zeal with which I pounced on weeds, the poring over gardening books, the plans made as I sat on the little seat in the middle gazing admiringly and with the eye of faith on the trim surface so soon to be gemmed with a thousand flowers, the reckless expenditure of pfennings, the humiliation of my position in regard to Fraulein Wundermacher, all, all had been in vain.
In accordance with a custom of the mountain, one of the girls made me a "Brocken nosegay," of heather, lichens and moss. I gave her a few pfennings and stowed it away carefully in a corner of my knapsack. I now began descending the east side, by a good road over fields of bare rock and through large forests of pine.
The former has sixty kreutzers, of two thirds of a cent each, the latter one hundred, of about half a cent each. In Prussian Germany, twelve pfennings make a silver groschen. Five pfennings, therefore, are about equal to a cent. Of course these values vary with the rates of exchange, and even in the different countries where the currency is used."
We are paid six pfennings a day for lodging a common soldier, and six pfennings for his horse rather more than a penny in English money for the pair of them; only unfortunately sheds and carpentry are not quite so cheap.
Eighty pfennings a day is added for the soldier's food, and for this he has to receive two pounds of bread, half a pound of meat, a quarter of a pound of bacon, and either a quarter of a pound of rice or barley or three pounds of potatoes.
Two women would go round to every woman and girl in the shop and tell them: 'We have asked for twenty or thirty pfennings more. To-morrow we are going on strike. She who does not come out will have the thrashing of her life. We were all frightened and stayed away, for they really meant it."
When I grew bigger and had a small garden of my own, I bought their seeds to the extent of twenty pfennings, and trained the plants over the rabbit-hutch that was the chief feature in the landscape. There were other seeds in that garden seeds on which I had laid out all my savings and round which played my fondest hopes, but the sweet-peas were the only ones that came up.
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