alighted, and Mr. Knowlton drove on, promising to send the
waggon back from Elmfield.

It was coming down, in more ways than one, to get out of the waggon and
go in to make her visit. Diana did not feel just ready for it. She
loosened the strings of her hat, walked slowly up the path between the
hollyhocks that led to the door, and there stopped and turned to take a
last look at Mr. Knowlton in the distance. Such a ride as she had had!
Such an entertainment! People in Pleasant Valley did not talk like
that; nor look like that. How much difference it makes, to have
education and to see the world! And a military education especially has
a more liberalizing and adorning effect than the course of life in the
colleges; the manner of a soldier has in it a charm which is wanting in
the manner of a minister. As for farmers, they have no manners at all.
And the very faces, thought Diana.

Well, she could not stand there on the door-step. She must go in. She
turned and lifted the latch of the door.

The little room within was empty. It was a tiny house; the ground floor
boasted only two rooms, and each of those was small. The broad hearth
of flagstones took up a third of the floor of this one. A fire burned
in the chimney, though the day was so warm; and a straight-backed
arm-chair, with a faded cushion in it, stood by the chimney corner with
a bunch of knitting lying on the cushion. Diana tapped at an inner door
at her right, and then getting no answer, went across the kitchen and
opened another opposite the one that had admitted her.

CHAPTER IV.

MOTHER BARTLETT.

The little house, unpainted like many others, had no fenced enclosure
on this side. A wide field stretched away from the back door, lying
partly upon a hill-side; and several cattle were pasturing in it. Farm
fields and meadows were all around, except where this one hill rose up
behind the house. It was wooded at the top; below, the ranks of a
cornfield sloped aspiringly up its base. A narrow footpath, which only
the tread of feet kept free from weeds and grass, went off obliquely to
a little enclosed garden, which lay beyond the corner of the house in
some arbitrary and independent way, not adjoining it at all. It was a
sweet bit of country, soft and mellow under the summer sun; still as
grasshoppers and the tinkle of a cowbell could make it; and very far
from most of the improvements of the nineteenth century. But the smell
of the pasture and th