house-hunting by herself!

What made her first think of Middlemead she has never been able to
remember. She did not know any one there, and she had never been there
in her life. She fancies it was that she had read in some book or
advertisement perhaps, that it was so very healthy, and dear
grandmamma's one idea was to make me as strong as she could; for I was
rather a delicate child. But for me, indeed, I don't think she would
have cared where she lived, or to live at all, except that she was so
very good.

'As long as any one is left alive,' she has often said to me, 'it shows
that there is something for them to be or to do in the world, and they
must try to find out what it is.'

But there was not much difficulty for grandmamma to find out what _her_
principal use in the world was to be! It was all ready indeed--it was
poor, little, puny, delicate, helpless _me_!

So very likely it was as she thought--just the hearing how splendidly
healthy the place was--that made her travel down to Middlemead in those
early spring days, that first sad year after mamma's death, to look for
a nest for her little fledgling. She arrived there in pretty good
spirits; she had written to a house-agent and had got the names of two
or three 'to let' houses, which she at once tramped off from the station
to look at, for she was very anxious not to spend a penny more than she
could help. But, oh dear, how her spirits went down! The houses were
dreadful; one was a miserable sort of genteel cottage in a row of others
all exactly the same, with lots of messy-looking children playing about
in the untidy strips of garden in front. _That_ would certainly not do,
for even if the house itself had been the least nice, grandmamma felt
sure I would catch measles and scarlet-fever and hooping-cough every
two or three days! The next one was a still more genteel 'semi-detached'
villa, but it was very badly built, the walls were like paper, and it
faced north and east, and had been standing empty, no doubt, for these
reasons, for years. _It_ would not do. Then poor granny plodded back to
the house agent's again. He isn't only a house agent, he has a
stationer's and bookseller's shop, and his name is Timbs. I know him
quite well. He is rather a nice man, and though she was a stranger of
course, he seemed sorry for grandmamma's disappointment.

'There are several very good little houses that I am sure you would
like,' he said to her, 'and one or two of