drowsily.

CHAPTER XXII

The next morning, after Anne insisted that she could not possibly eat
any more corn-cakes or biscuits or toast or fried apples or chicken or
ham or potato-cakes or molasses or honey, Mrs. Collins picked her up and
put her in a rocking-chair by the south window.

"Now, you set thar and rest," she commanded, "till Lizzie does up her
work and has time to play with you. You Lizzie! Hurry and wash them
dishes and sweep this floor and dust my room and then take the little
old lady's breakfast to her. It's in the stove, keeping warm."

"Let me help Lizzie," begged Anne. "I know how to sweep and dust and
wash dishes. We had to do those things--turn about, you know--at the
'Home.'"

"You set right still," repeated Mrs. Collins, "and let some meat grow on
yo' po' little bones. I know how they treat you at them 'sylums, making
you work day in, day out. Oh, it's a dog's life!"

"But, Mrs. Collins, they were good to me, and kind as could be. I didn't
have to work so hard. I just did the things that Lizzie does."

"Uh! Lizzie!" was the response, "that's diff'rent. She's at home. She
works when I tell her--if she chooses," Mrs. Collins concluded with a
chuckle, for Lizzie had dropped her broom and was sitting in the middle
of the floor pulling Honey-Sweet's shoes and stockings off and on.

Anne went outdoors presently to look around the dear old place. 'Lewis
Hall,' a roomy frame-house built before the Revolution, was on a hill
which sloped gently toward the corn-fields and meadows that bordered the
lazy river beyond which rose the bluffs of Buckingham. Back of the
house, a level space was laid out in a formal garden. The boxwood,
brought from England when that was the mother country, met across the
turf walks. Long-neglected flowers--damask and cabbage roses, zinnias,
cock's-comb, hollyhocks--grew half-wild, making masses of glowing color.
Along the walks, where there had paced, a hundred years before, stately
Lewis ladies in brocade and stately Lewis gentlemen in velvet coats, now
tripped an orphan girl, a stranger in her father's home. But she was a
very happy little maid as she roamed about the spacious old garden on
that sunshiny summer day, gathering hollyhocks and zinnias for ladies to
occupy her playhouse in the gnarled roots of an old oak-tree.

When Lizzie came out to play, she and Anne wandered away to the fields.
There was a dear little baby brook--how well Anne remembered it!--th