ched out his arms after her vanishing form. "I
hope," he said, "that you caught that touching reference to 'the dear
ruin,' and could anything be expressed more beautifully and poetically
than that 'verdantly still?'"

I feel sorry for a snake. I like hoptoads, owls, and shitepokes. I
envy a buzzard the way it can fly, and polecats are beautiful; but I
never could get up any sort of feeling at all for Miss Amelia, whether
she was birdlike or her true self. So no one was any gladder than I
when she was gone.

After that, spring came pushing until you felt shoved. Our family
needed me then. If they never had known it before, they found out
there was none too many of us. Every day I had to watch the blue
goose, and bring in her egg before it was chilled, carrying it
carefully so it would not be jarred. I had to hunt the turkey nests
and gather their eggs so they would be right for setting. There had to
be straw carried from the stack for new nests, eggs marked, and hens
set by the dozen. Garden time came, so leaves had to be raked from the
beds and from the dooryard. No one was busier than I; but every little
while I ran away, and spent some time all by myself in the pulpit,
under the hawk oak, or on the roof.

Coming from church that Sunday, when we reached the top of the Big
Hill, mother touched father's arm. "Stop a minute," she said, and he
checked the horses, while we sat there and wondered why, as she looked
and looked all over the farm, then, "Now drive to the top of the Little
Hill and turn, and stop exactly on the place from which we first viewed
this land together," she said. "You know the spot, don't you?"

"You may well believe I know it," said father. "I can hit it to the
inch. You see, children," he went on, "your mother and I arranged
before the words were said over us"--he always put it that way--I never
in my life heard him say, "when we were married"; he read so many books
he talked exactly like a book--"that we would be partners in
everything, as long as we lived. When we decided the Ohio land was not
quite what we wanted, she sent me farther west to prospect, while she
stayed at home and kept the baby. When I reached this land, found it
for sale, and within my means, I bought it, and started home happy.
Before I'd gone a mile, I turned to look back, and saw that it was
hilly, mostly woods, and there was no computing the amount of work it
would require to make it what I could see in