In all directions signs of the approaching season begin to appear. Every old woman in the market-place offers for sale a store of hard-boiled eggs, smeared over with some highly colored varnish, besides candy chickens, hares, etc., in abundance. All the various shop windows display pretty emblematic articles. Besides the sugar and chocolate eggs, there are eggs of soap and of glass; egg-shaped baskets and reticules; leather eggs, which really are ladies' companions, and filled with sewing implements; wooden eggs and porcelain eggs, and even egg-shaped lockets made of solid gold.
It would be difficult to explain why these things appear at Easter, and what they all mean. The eggs, as every one knows, we have at home, and where they are in such abundance chickens will not be very far away. For the lamb and the goat we can find scriptural interpretations, but the rabbit and the hare--what can they have to do with Easter? Nine persons out of ten can only answer, "The hares lay the Easter eggs." Queer hares they must be, indeed, but the children here believe it as devoutly as they do that the "Christ-kind" brings their Christmas presents, or as our own little ones do in Santa Claus. No one knows exactly whence came this myth. Many think it a relic of heathen worship; but a writer named Christoph von Schmid, in an interesting story for children, suggests this much prettier origin:
Many hundred years ago, a good and noble lady, Duchess Rosilinda von Lindenburg, at a time when a cruel war was devastating the land, was obliged to fly from her beautiful home accompanied only by her two little children and one old man-servant.
They found refuge in a small mining village in the mountains, where the simple but contented and happy inhabitants did what they could for their comfort, and placed the best of all they had at the disposal of the wanderers. Nevertheless, their fare was miserable; no meat was ever to be found, seldom fish, and not even an egg; this last for the very good reason that there was not a single hen in the village! These useful domestic fowls, now so common everywhere, were originally brought from the East, and had not yet found their way to this secluded place. The people had not even heard of such "strange birds." This troubled the kind duchess, who well knew the great help they are in housekeeping, and she determined that the women who had been so kind to her should no longer be without them.