n as they met one another in the living,
laughing world, going up and down the hill.

"It's very becoming to the universe, snow is!" thought Rebecca, looking
out of the window dreamily. "Really there's little to choose between the
world and heaven when a snowstorm is going on. I feel as if I ought to
look at it every minute. I wish I could get over being greedy, but it
still seems to me at sixteen as if there weren't waking hours enough
in the day, and as if somehow I were pressed for time and continually
losing something. How well I remember mother's story about me when I
was four. It was at early breakfast on the farm, but I called all meals
dinner' then, and when I had finished I folded up my bib and sighed: O,
dear! Only two more dinners, play a while and go to bed!' This was at
six in the morning--lamplight in the kitchen, snowlight outside!

Powdery, powdery, powdery snow,
Making things lovely wherever you go!
Merciful, merciful, merciful snow,
Masking the ugliness hidden below.

Herbert made me promise to do a poem for the January 'Pilot,' but I
mustn't take the snow as a subject; there has been too great competition
among the older poets!" And with that she turned in her chair and began
writing again in the shabby book, which was already three quarters
filled with childish scribblings, sometimes in pencil, and sometimes in
violet ink with carefully shaded capital letters."

* * * * *

Squire Bean has had a sharp attack of rheumatism and Abijah Flagg came
back from Limerick for a few days to nurse him. One morning the Burnham
sisters from North Riverboro came over to spend the day with Aunt
Miranda, and Abijah went down to put up their horse. ("'Commodatin'
'Bijah" was his pet name when we were all young.)

He scaled the ladder to the barn chamber--the dear old ladder that
used to be my safety valve!--and pitched down the last forkful of
grandfather's hay that will ever be eaten by any visiting horse. They
WILL be delighted to hear that it is all gone; they have grumbled at it
for years and years.

What should Abijah find at the bottom of the heap but my Thought Book,
hidden there two or three years ago and forgotten!

When I think of what it was to me, the place it filled in my life, the
affection I lavished on it, I wonder that I could forget it, even in
all the excitement of coming to Wareham to school. And that gives me
"an uncommon thought" as I used to say! It is this: that whe