olden-tasseled corn, rustling in the breeze and
shimmering in the sunlight, many of the stalks so entwined with
morning-glories, pink, white, blue, and variegated, one could almost
believe fairies had been there and arrayed the yellow silken-haired corn
babies for some festival, so crowned and garlanded they were. In front of
the house were wooded slopes, where the birds sang their love songs and
chattered noisily in bird language all the day long. Those woodlands might
have been called a primeval forest, for the trees were truly there in the
earliest memory of the oldest living resident of the county.

It used to puzzle me to understand how the birds knew when it was time to
wake up and begin their matin songs, for it was so like night there.
Roberta, who was an early riser and withal a child of poetic imagination,
used to say "that the fairies woke them up." She declared she saw a little
glittering thing, with wings and wand of silver, alight on the tops of the
trees and peep through at the Darbys and Joans of the bird tribe. And she
was sure it must have told them it was time to wake up; for soon would
begin a low twitter that swelled louder and louder, as bird after bird
joined in until every family of birds was represented. From the back porch
of the house could be seen a range of blue misty hills, that Roberta
called brides. They were often enveloped in white filmy folds, like bridal
veils, and one might catch glimpses of the river from there also gliding
along between banks of green.

A giant's great glittering eye she called that; the trees on the hills
above the giant's brows, and the ferns and grasses growing on either bank
were upper and lower lashes. With a little encouragement Roberta would
have been a genuine poet.

But Aunt Betsy took such a literal view of things, she was constantly
saying to Mrs. Marsden:

"That child's imagination will get away with her, Julia, if you don't
check it. It will, indeed."

And she had a way of making the child repeat over and over again
descriptions of things that had struck her fancy, and cutting here and
there until the description didn't seem applicable at all to the places
she had seen.

"I feel just like the old woman in Mother Goose, Auntie," Roberta would
say, her eyes full of vexed tears, "when she woke up on the king's highway
and found her petticoats were cut off."

"But truth is truth, child," said Aunt Betsy.

Aunt Betsy's intensely realistic temperame