to work and earn my living.
And now I am very young, I know. But then I am eighteen."

"Are you eighteen?" asked Mrs. Bell.

"Yes," said Mary Erskine, "I was eighteen the day before yesterday."

"It is a lonesome place,--out beyond Kater's Corner," said Mrs. Bell,
after another pause.

"Yes," said Mary Erskine, "but I am not afraid of lonesomeness. I
never cared about seeing a great many people."

"And you will have to work very hard," continued Mrs. Bell.

"I know that," replied Mary; "but then I am not afraid of work any
more than I am of lonesomeness. I began to work when I was five years
old, and I have worked ever since,--and I like it."

"Then, besides," said Mrs. Bell, "I don't know what I shall do with
_my_ Mary when you have gone away. You have had the care of her
ever since she was born."

Mary Erskine did not reply to this. She turned her head away farther
and farther from Mrs. Bell, looking over the railing of the stoop
toward the white roses. In a minute or two she got up suddenly from
her seat, and still keeping her face averted from Mrs. Bell, she went
in by the stoop door into the house, and disappeared. In about ten
minutes she came round the corner of the house, at the place where
Mary Bell was playing, and with a radiant and happy face, and tones
as joyous as ever, she told her little charge that they would have one
game of hide and go seek, in the asparagus, and that then it would be
time for her to go to bed.

Two days after this, Albert closed the bargain for his land, and began
his work upon it. The farm, or rather the lot, for the farm was yet
to be made, consisted of a hundred and sixty acres of land, all in
forest. A great deal of the land was mountainous and rocky, fit only
for woodland and pasturage. There were, however, a great many fertile
vales and dells, and at one place along the bank of a stream, there
was a broad tract which Albert thought would make, when the trees
were felled and it was brought into grass, a "beautiful piece of
intervale."

Albert commenced his operations by felling several acres of trees, on
a part of his lot which was nearest the corner. A road, which had been
laid out through the woods, led across his land near this place. The
trees and bushes had been cut away so as to open a space wide enough
for a sled road in winter. In summer there was nothing but a wild
path, winding among rocks, stumps, trunks of fallen trees, and other
forest obstructions. A