ut in the window-sill. There'd be room, enough for _us_, but
this whole farm isn't comfortable for Ma and me!"

After that, Miss Blin only said that she would speak to Kellup;
meaning her brother, Caleb Bree.

Caleb Bree was just the sort of man that by divine compensation
generally marries, or gets married by a woman that is
"right-up-and-a-comin'." He "had no objections," to this plan of
Bel's, I mean; perhaps his favorite phrase would have expressed his
strongest feeling in the crisis just referred to, also; it was a
normal state of mind with him; he had gone through the world, thus
far, on the principle of _not_ "having objections." He had none now,
"if Ma'am hadn't, and Blin saw best." He let his child go out from
his house down into the great, unknown, struggling, hustling,
devouring city, without much thought or inquiry. It settled _that_
point in his family. "Bel had gone down to Boston to be a
dress-maker, 'long of her Aunt Blindy," was what he had to say to
his neighbors. It sounded natural and satisfactory. House-holds
break up after the children are grown, of course; they all settle to
something; that is all it comes to--the child-life out of which if
they had died and gone away, there would have been wailing and
heart-breaking; the loving and tending and watching through cunning
ways and helpless prettiness and small knowledge-getting: they turn
into men and women, and they go out into the towns, or they get
married, even--and nobody thinks, then, that the little children are
dead! But they are: they are dead, out of the household, and they
never come back to it any more.

Caleb Bree let Bel go, never once thinking that after this she never
_could_ come back the same.

Mrs. Bree had her own two children,--and there might be more--that
would claim all that could be done for them. She would miss Bel's
telling them stories, and washing their faces, and carrying them off
into the barn or the orchard, and leaving the house quiet of a
Sunday or a busy baking-day. It had been "all Bel was good for;"
and it had been more than Mrs. Bree had appreciated at the time. Bel
cried when she kissed them and bade them good-by; but she was gone;
she and her round leather trunk and her little bird in its cage that
she could not leave behind, though Aunt Blin did say that "she
wouldn't altogether answer for it with Bartholomew."

Bel herself,--the other little bird,--who had never tried her
wings, or been shut up in stra