in Janet's
vocabulary at all.

"'Wayside' is a dear sort of little spot. The house is small and white,
set down in a delightful little hollow that drops away from the road.
Between road and house is an orchard and flower-garden all mixed
up together. The front door walk is bordered with quahog
clam-shells--'cow-hawks,' Janet calls them; there is Virginia Creeper
over the porch and moss on the roof. My room is a neat little spot 'off
the parlor'--just big enough for the bed and me. Over the head of my
bed there is a picture of Robby Burns standing at Highland Mary's
grave, shadowed by an enormous weeping willow tree. Robby's face is so
lugubrious that it is no wonder I have bad dreams. Why, the first night
I was here I dreamed I COULDN'T LAUGH.

"The parlor is tiny and neat. Its one window is so shaded by a huge
willow that the room has a grotto-like effect of emerald gloom. There
are wonderful tidies on the chairs, and gay mats on the floor, and books
and cards carefully arranged on a round table, and vases of dried grass
on the mantel-piece. Between the vases is a cheerful decoration of
preserved coffin plates--five in all, pertaining respectively to Janet's
father and mother, a brother, her sister Anne, and a hired man who died
here once! If I go suddenly insane some of these days 'know all men by
these presents' that those coffin-plates have caused it.

"But it's all delightful and I said so. Janet loved me for it, just
as she detested poor Esther because Esther had said so much shade was
unhygienic and had objected to sleeping on a feather bed. Now, I glory
in feather-beds, and the more unhygienic and feathery they are the more
I glory. Janet says it is such a comfort to see me eat; she had been
so afraid I would be like Miss Haythorne, who wouldn't eat anything but
fruit and hot water for breakfast and tried to make Janet give up frying
things. Esther is really a dear girl, but she is rather given to fads.
The trouble is that she hasn't enough imagination and HAS a tendency to
indigestion.

"Janet told me I could have the use of the parlor when any young men
called! I don't think there are many to call. I haven't seen a young man
in Valley Road yet, except the next-door hired boy--Sam Toliver, a very
tall, lank, tow-haired youth. He came over one evening recently and sat
for an hour on the garden fence, near the front porch where Janet and I
were doing fancy-work. The only remarks he volunteered in all that
ti