ara and
Johanna, hand in hand--Johanna was eleven and very black--often looked
on this object with whispering awe, though neither had ever known it put
to fiercer use than to drive chickens out of the hall. Down in the yard,
across to the left, was the kitchen. And lastly, there was that railed
platform on the hip-roof, whence one could see, in the northeast, over
the tops of the grove, the hills and then the mountains; in the
southeast the far edge of Turkey Creek battle-ground; and in the west,
the great setting sun, often, from this point, commended to Barbara as
going to bed quietly and before dark.

The child did not remember the father. Once or twice during the war when
otherwise he might have come home on furlough, the enemy had intervened.
Yet she held no enthusiastic unbelief in his personal reality, and
prayed for him night and morning: that God would bless him and keep him
from being naughty--"No, that ain't it--an' keep him f'om bein'--no,
don't tell me!--and ast him why he don't come see what a sweet mom-a I'm
dot!"

People were never quite done marveling that even Garnet should have won
the mistress of this inheritance, whom no one else had ever dared to
woo. Her hair was so dark you might have called it black--her eyes were
as blue as June, and all the elements of her outward beauty were but the
various testimonies of a noble mind. She had been very willing for
Rosemont to be founded here. There was a belief in her family that the
original patentee--he that had once owned the whole site of Suez and
more--had really from the first intended this spot for a college site,
and when Garnet proposed that with his savings they build and open upon
it a male academy, of which he should be principal, she consented with
an alacrity which his vanity never ceased to resent, since it involved
his leaving the pulpit. For Principal Garnet was very proud of his moral
character.

On the same afternoon in which John March first saw the Major and
Jeff-Jack, Barbara and Johanna were down by the spring-house at play.
This structure stood a good two hundred yards from the dwelling, where a
brook crossed the road. Three wooded slopes ran down to it, and beneath
the leafy arches of a hundred green shadows that only at noon were
flecked with sunlight, the water glassed and crinkled scarce ankle deep
over an unbroken floor of naked rock.

The pair were wading, Barbara in the road, Johanna at its edge, when
suddenly Barbara was