ar water; the millstones that rumble so
swiftly; the dusty miller who takes the bags of grain--all interest him,
and especially so does the pond above the mill that is dotted with white
lilies and where there is a boat fastened to a willow by a chain. On the
way back, and a mile from home, his father stops to chat with a man in
front of a large house with tall pillars, and two immense maples on
either side of the gate. Standing beside the man and holding onto one of
his hands with her two small ones is a little girl who looks at the boy
with big, wondrous eyes. He wants to tell her about the mill and ask her
if she ever saw the great wheel go around, but he is afraid to. He hears
the man call her "Liddy," and wonders if she ever caught a fish.

Then his world grows larger as the months pass one by one, until he is
sent to a little brown schoolhouse a mile away and finds a small crowd
of boys and girls, only two or three of whom he ever saw before. One of
them is the girl who looked wonderingly at him a year previous. He tells
her he knows what her name is, and feels a little hurt because that fact
does not seem to interest her. He studies his lessons because he is told
he must, and plays hard because he enjoys it. He feels no special
attraction toward any of his schoolmates until one winter day this same
little blue-eyed girl asks him for a place on his sled. He shares it
with her as a well-behaved boy should, and so begins the first faint
bond of feeling that like a tiny rill on the hillside slowly gathers
power, until at last, a mighty river, it sweeps all other feelings
before it.

How slowly that rippling rill of feeling grew during the next few years
need not be specified. Like other boys of his age, he feels at times
ashamed of caring whether she notices him or not, and again the
incipient pangs of jealousy, because she notices other boys. In a year
he begins to bring her flag-root in summer, or big apples in winter, and
although her way home is different from his, he occasionally feels
called upon to accompany her, heedless of the fact that it costs him an
extra half-mile and fault-finding at being late home. He passes unharmed
through the terrors of speaking pieces on examination day, and when St.
Valentine's day comes he conquers the momentous task of inditing a verse
where "bliss" rhymes with "kiss" upon one of those missives which he has
purchased for five cents at the village store, and timidly leaves it
wh