Veronica by Johanna Spyri, Fiction, Historical

"Be still, be still," said the woman. The child's mother was gone, lost to the fierceness of the winter. "I shall find something pretty for you presently; then you must sit down quietly and play with it, and not go outside, not one step, do you hear? Pshaw! there is nothing but rubbish here!" "Well, then give us the rose," said the little girl, still scowling. The woman looked about the room. "There are no roses here," she said. "How should there be, in March?" she added, half vexed at having looked for them. "There," said the child, pointing towards a book that the woman had but a moment before replaced in the cup-board. "Ah! now I know what you mean. So your mother always kept the rose, the 'Fortune rose?' I often envied her when she used to show it to us. . . ."

About the Author
Spyri, Johanna: - "Johanna Louise Spyri, née Heusser (1827 - 1901) was a Swiss-born author of novels, notably children's stories and is best known for her book Heidi. Born in Hirzel, a rural area in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland, as a child she spent several summers near Chur in Graubünden, the setting she later would use in her novels. In 1852, Johanna Heusser married Bernhard Spyri. Bernhard was a lawyer. Whilst living in the city of Zürich she began to write about life in the country. Her first story, A Note on Vrony's Grave, which deals with a woman's life of domestic violence, was published in 1880; the following year further stories for both adults and children appeared, among them the novel Heidi, which she wrote in four weeks. Heidi is the story of an orphan girl who lives with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps and is famous for its vivid portrayal of the landscape."