y was a charming child;
She never said, 'I won't.'"

After bearing this once or twice, the willful negative was continually
upon my lips; doubtless a symptom of what was dormant within--a will
perhaps not quite so aggressive as it was obstinate. But she meant only
to praise me and please me; and dearly I loved to stay with her in her
cozy up-stairs room across the lane, that the sun looked into nearly
all day.

Another adopted aunt lived down-stairs in the same house. This one was
a sober woman; life meant business to her, and she taught me to sew in
earnest, with a knot in the end of my thread, although it was only upon
clothing for my ragchildren--absurd creatures of my own invention,
limbless and destitute of features, except as now and then one of my
older sisters would, upon my earnest petition, outline a face for one
of them, with pen and ink. I loved them, nevertheless, far better than
I did the London doll that lay in waxen state in an upper drawer at
home,--the fine lady that did not wish to be played with, but only to
be looked at and admired.

This latter aunt I regarded as a woman of great possessions. She owned
the land beside us and opposite us. Her well was close to our door, a
well of the coldest and clearest water I ever drank, and it abundantly
supplied the whole neighborhood.

The hill behind her house was our general playground; and I supposed
she owned that, too, since through her dooryard, and over her stone
wall, was our permitted thoroughfare thither. I imagined that those
were her buttercups that we gathered when we got over the wall, and
held under each other's chin, to see, by the reflection, who was fond
of butter; and surely the yellow toadflax (we called it "lady's
slipper") that grew in the rock-crevices was hers, for we found it
nowhere else.

The blue gill-over-the-ground unmistakably belonged to her, for it
carpeted an unused triangular corner of her garden inclosed by a
leaning fence gray and gold with sea-side lichens. Its blue was
beautiful, but its pungent earthy odor--I can smell it now--repelled us
from the damp corner where it grew. It made us think of graves and
ghosts; and I think we were forbidden to go there. We much preferred to
sit on the sunken curbstones, in the shade of the broad-leaved
burdocks, and shape their spiny balls into chairs and cradles and sofas
for our dollies, or to "play school" on the doorsteps, or to climb over
the wall, and to feel the freedom