allery under the elm beyond the housetops.

II.

The big house, the back of which, with its double porticos and great
white pillars, Molly could see away up on the hill across the
intervening squares, was almost as different from the rickety tenement
in which the little cripple lay as daylight is from darkness. It was
on one of the highest points in the best part of the city, and was set
back in grounds laid off with flower beds and surrounded by a high iron
fence. In front it looked out on a handsome park, where fountains
played, and at the back, while it looked over a very poor part of the
town, filled with small, wretched looking houses, they were so far
beneath it that they were almost as much separated from it as though
they had been in another city. A high wall and a hedge quite shut off
everything in that direction, and it was only from the upper veranda
that one knew there was any part of the town on that side. Here,
however, Mildred, the little girl that Molly saw with her doll and
puppy, liked best to play.

Mildred was the daughter of Mr. Glendale, one of the leading men in the
city, and she lived in this house in the winter. In the summer she
lived in the country, in another house, quite as large as this, but
very different. The city house was taller than that in the country,
and had finer rooms and handsomer things. But, somehow, Mildred liked
the place in the country best. The house in the country was long and
had many rooms and curious corners with rambling passages leading to
them. It was in a great yard with trees and shrubbery and flowers in
it, with gardens about it filled with lilacs and rosebushes, and an
orchard beyond, full of fruit trees. Green fields stretched all about
it, where lambs and colts and calves played. And when in the country
Mildred played out of doors all day long.

[Illustration: "_MILDRED PLAYED OUT-OF-DOORS ALL DAY LONG_"]

The city Mildred did not like. She was a little lame and had to wear
braces; but the doctors had always said she must be kept out of doors,
and she would become strong and outgrow her lameness. Thus she had
been brought up in the country, and knew every corner and cranny there.
She knew where the robins and mocking-birds nested; the posts where the
bluebirds made their homes and brought up their young, and the hollow
locusts where the brown Jenny Wrens kept house, with doors so tiny that
Mildred could not have gotten her hand in them.