The Little Barefoot by Berthold Auerbach

Farmer Rodel, whose house, ornamented with red striped beams, and a pious sentence, enclosed in the form of a heart, stood not far from the Josenhans dwelling, had himself appointed by the Mayor, guardian of the orphan children. His guardianship consisted in nothing more than in preserving the unsold clothes of their father, and when he met or passed one of the children in the street he would ask, "Have you clothes enough? " and, without waiting to be answered, he would pass on. Yet the children felt a strange pride in having that great farmer called their guardian. They often stood by the great house and looked longingly at it, as though they expected something, they knew not what, and they sat often down by the ploughs and harrows at the corner of the shed and read over again and again the pious sentence on the house. The house spoke to them if all others were silent.

The Sunday before _All Souls_, the children played again before their parents' deserted house. They seemed, as it were, banished to this place. There came along the wife of Farmer Landfried from the Hochdorfer Road. She had a red silk umbrella under her arm and a dark hymn-book in her hand. She had come to make her last visit in the place of her birth. Yesterday, her servant in a four-horse wagon had taken all her furniture out of the village, and early this morning with her husband and three children she would move to their lately purchased estate in the far-off district of Allgäu. When at some distance she nodded to the children; but they saw nothing but the melancholy expression upon the face of the woman. As she now stood by them she said, "God bless you, children! what do you do here? to whom do you belong? "