Of course there were no telephones, electric lights, steam trains or automobiles, and so often this doctor was away from home for two or three days attending the people who needed his help. His trips took him into little villages where there were only a few hundred poor people who made a scant living from farming and sheep raising, but he knew them so well that he became very fond of them, and he shared their sorrows and joys. When he returned home he would tell his little daughter, who was Johanna Spyri, about what he had seen and heard. She became very much interested in the people whom her father told about, and when she grew up she visited many of the places that he had told her about when she was a child.