ver the boundaries of June into July.

Yes, June has gone to look for all its dead brothers, wherever--since
they say nothing is ever really lost--they lie with their stored sweets.
To me, this has been as merry and good a June as any one of my nineteen.

Sir Roger is beginning to talk of going home--_his_ home, that is--but
rather diffidently and tentatively, as if not quite sure whether the
proposal will meet with favor in my eyes. He need not be nervous on this
point. I, too, am rather anxious and eager to see my house--_my_ house,
if you please!--I, who have never hitherto possessed any larger
residence than a doll's house, whose whole front wall opened at once,
giving one an improbably simultaneous view of kitchen-range, best
four-poster, and drawing-room chairs. I have, it is true, seen
photographs of my new house, photographs of its east front, of its west
front--photographs, in its park, of the great old cedar; in its gardens,
of its woody pool--but, to tell you the truth, I want to see _it_. I
have already planned a house-warming, and invited them all to it, a
house-warming in which--oh, absurd!--_I_ shall sit at the head of the
table, and father and mother only at the sides--_I_ shall tell the
people who they are to take in to dinner, and nod my head from the top
when dessert is ended.

To-day I am going to write and secure the Brat's company--that is, later
in the day--but now it is quite, _quite_ early, even the letters have
not come in. We have all--viz., the boys, the girls, and I--risen (in
pursuance of a plan made overnight) preternaturally early, almost as
early as I did on my wedding-morning, and are going out to gather
mushrooms in the meadow, by the river. Indignation against the
inhabitants of the neighboring town is what has torn us from our morning
dreams, the greedy townsfolk, by whom, on every previous occasion, we
have found our meadow rifled before we could reach it. To-day we shall,
at least, meet them on equal terms. We are all rather gapy at first,
more especially Algy, who has deferred the making of the greater part of
his toilet till his return, looks disheveled, and sounds grumbling. But
before long both gapes and grumbles depart.

Who would see the day when he is old, and stale, and shabby, when, like
us, they could come out to meet him as he walks across the meadow with a
mantle of dew wrapped round him, and a garland of paling rose-clouds,
that an hour ago were crimson, about his h