Chapter III: Part 3

"Helen, put the kettle on, and we'll all have tea," chanted Kit. "You know, Cousin Roxy, we always make Helen fix our tea. It isn't that she does it so wonderfully better than the rest of us, but she thinks she does, and she makes the most enticing ceremonial of it. You want to burn incense and kowtow before her serene highness. Wait till you see her do it!"

Helen rose and made a deep curtsey before Miss Robbins.

"We ask the pleasure of your ladyship's presence at tea two weeks from today."

"Oh, I'll be here," Cousin Roxana answered. "But I guess we'll leave the ladyship behind. I've got a Quaker great-grandmother tucked in behind me along the line of ancestors, and there's a silver goblet up home that Benjamin Franklin drank from once when he was a guest at your great-great-great-grandfather Eliot's place on the old Providence plantations. Nice, pleasant, unassuming sort of man too, I've always heard tell he was. So I'm all democrat clear through."

"You're a darling," Doris exclaimed, hugging her from behind, both arms wound tightly around her throat. "We'd never have come up here at all if it hadn't been for you."

"There, child, there. It says in the Book, you know, 'The Lord moveth in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform,' and if I do say it as shouldn't, He seems to pick me out every once in a while and lets me help a little bit, blessed be His Name. Now, let's start for home." She rose from the porch step energetically. "Ella Lou's begun to move around and that's to let me know it's after five. She can always tell the time when the sun gets low."

"I feel sure Mother wants the place, don't you, Jean?" Kit asked, as the girls went up through the woods towards home. "All the time we were going through the house I could see every bit of our furniture in the right places there. And there's so much room that Dad will hardly know the difference between this place and the old one at the Cove. He could have those two big rooms overlooking the valley on the second floor. You can see the great brown stone dam from there and the ruins of the mill, and hear the falling water. I wish we had time to climb out over the old dam to the mill."

"It's better than living right in a village," Jean answered, pushing aside the young birches that crowded the way. "I rather dreaded that somehow. Everybody'd want to know all about us right off, and why we came up, and what ailed Dad, and everything else. I hope, though, Mother won't be lonely here. You know, girls, it is lonely for a woman like her, where Cousin Roxy doesn't mind it."

"We'll have to pitch in and make up to her for everything she's lost," said Doris solemnly.

"Dear old Dorrie." Kit put her arm around the littlest sister and squeezed her affectionately. "You know, you are an awful make-believe. You are just like somebody, I've forgotten who it was, in the old Norse fairy lore, who lost his way over the hills and fell asleep in a magic ring, and when he wakened the wee folks had anointed his eyes with fairy ointment and everything that he looked at after that seemed beautiful to him. Goodness knows we're going to need something like that out here. Of course it's all lovely now, but what will it be like in the winter when the north wind doth blow, and we shall have snow, and what will poor robin do then, poor thing?"

"It's all a question of system," Jean declared, her hands deep in her white sweater pockets, and its collar turned high around her neck. "We'll have to make a business of living, and learn how to do things we hate to do with the least effort."

"You're just a bluffer, Jean Robbins," exclaimed Helen, "just a bluffer. Anyone would think to hear you talk that you actually enjoyed privations. Of course when we're with Mother and Dad, or even Cousin Roxy, we have to put on a whole lot, but when we're alone I do think we might at least be sincere with ourselves. We all know how we feel at heart about this sort of thing."

"What sort of thing?" asked Kit, on the offensive instantly. "What do you mean?"

"Giving up everything we've been used to, and living out here in the woods. I'm going to miss the girls most of all."

"Well, we don't like losing everything any better than you do, Helen," Jean said soothingly. "Only--"

"Don't pat me," retorted Helen, shaking off her hand; "I know I'm selfish, and I'm beginning to feel sorry I said anything. Only it does look so bleak and forlorn here somehow."

"But if you have to do a thing, why, you just have to do it, that's all," Kit declared. "It's better to make up your mind you're going to like it. Look at that cow ahead of us. It must have strayed."

Through the birches ahead they could see some object obstructing the narrow path, its back towards them. Large as a cow it was, and reddish brown, but in place of short horns, this animal had spreading antlers, and Jean caught sight of its round puff of a tail.

"Oh, girls, it's a deer!"

At her voice the deer started and pushed into the thick underbrush until it came to a stone wall. They watched it rise and clear it at a bound like a thoroughbred horse, its knees bent under, its head held high. Then it was gone.

"Well, isn't that perfectly gorgeous!" gasped Kit, explosively. "I've never seen one on its native heath before. Wish we could tame some, don't you, girls?"

"The Lady Kathleen doth already see a baronial estate with does and fawns at large," said Jean teasingly. "Wouldst have a few white peacocks standing on one foot upon thy entrance gates, oh, sister mine?"

"Well, I don't know but what they would look nice," Kit answered placidly. "I tell you what we do want to raise--turkeys. I've always wanted turkeys or geese. It's the simple turkey-tender that the fairy godmother turns into a beauteous princess."

Doris danced along the path ahead of them.

"I like this ever so much better than the Cove," she called. "It is all so wild and free."

"It will be fun mixing things up and making a success out of it whether it wants to be or not--I mean the new home," Jean replied. "Only we're sure to get lonely sometimes for the people we liked down there. You know what I mean, don't you, Helen?"

"Indeed I do," Helen said fervently. "That's just what I told you. Think of our being buried up here in these woods for months and maybe years."

"Still, it is worse for Mother. It's sort of an adventure for us girls from which we'll escape some time, but it's the real thing for her, something that's going to last perhaps all through her life."

"No, it won't, Kit, because we'll grow up and rescue her if she doesn't like it."

"What about Dad?" asked Doris. "The doctors in the city say he'll never get any better, and the old doctor up here says he'll begin to get better at once if he just stops thinking about himself and gets out of doors."

"I'd believe a doctor that talked to me like that even if I was half afraid he might be wrong," Kit said soberly.

They paused at a spur of land that looked out over the long valley. Little River flowed in a winding course marked by alders and willows. Now that there was no foliage to obscure the view, they could catch a glimpse here and there of a red roof or a white chimney. There was the Smith mill, then the old white Murray homestead with its weather vane standing on a little hill like a big yardarm at large. Then came their own old ruined mill, half tumbling down, with empty window casings, all overgrown with woodbine and poison ivy. Farther up the valley one caught the hum of another mill, purring musically in a sort of crescendo scale until it broke off into a snappy zip! as the log broke.

Already Jean declared she knew the names and histories of all the people there, and which way the roads went, and where the nearest towns lay.

"I feel exactly as if I stood now on the crest of the Delectable Mountains," she said with a quiet; sigh. They had stood there some time in silence, looking at the widespread land of hills and valleys, upland meadows, warm and brown in the early spring sunshine, and sweeps of woodland, russet red with maple and ash, with here and there the dark sombre richness of laurel or pine. "Who was it did that, Christian in 'Pilgrim's Progress,' wasn't it?"

Helen and Doris knelt to look at some blossoming saxifrage at the edge of a rock. Kit stood erect and tender-eyed.

"Oh, I don't know who it was," she said, quite gently for her, "but I know how he felt anyway. I always feel that way when I look out over vast distances, specially skylands; I wish I had wings or was all I want to be. Don't you know what I mean, Jeanie? It makes you think of all the things you hope to do some day."

"Like the spies that Gideon sent forth to look over the Promised Land," Jean answered. "I always think of them at such times, traveling miles and miles up through the mountains until all at once they came to a sudden opening and they looked out at it all lying at their feet like this."

Kit smiled, her cheeks rosy from the upland climb, her hands deep in her sporting coat pockets. There was almost a challenging tilt to her chin as she faced that sweep of valley, barren and brown in the spring sunset hour.

"Well, it is _our_ Promised Land," she declared, "and I can tell it right now that it's got to blossom like the rose and pour out milk and honey, because we've come to stay."

*CHAPTER IX*

*THE LADY MANAGERS CHOOSE A NAME*

That very night a council was held of what Mr. Robbins termed "the Board of Lady Managers."

"I think I need Hiram in here for support," he said laughingly, from his favorite resting place, the old fashioned high-backed davenport in the sitting-room.

There were no such things at Maple Lawn as a library, a reception room, or a den. There was a front entry and a side entry and a well-room at the back of the kitchen. There was a parlor and a front bed-room, a side bed-room and a big sunny sitting-room that was dining-room also, and finally the old kitchen with its Dutch oven, and hooks in the ceiling for hanging up smoked beef and bacon sides.

Not that Cousin Roxy ever used the Dutch oven nowadays excepting to store things away in. She had instead a fine shiny, water-back steel range, over which she hovered like a sorceress from five A.M. to eleven A.M., producing such marvels of cookery as held the girls spellbound: raised doughnuts with jam inside and powdered sugar outside; apple turnovers made with Peck's Pleasants and rich Baldwins; ginger cookies, large as saucers with scalloped edges, soft and rich as butter scotch; and pies, with rich, flaky crust and delectable filling in endless varieties. Jean declared that she had learned more about cooking in the few weeks she had lived at Maple Lawn than in all her life before.

"Well, there's cooking and cooking, girls," Cousin Roxana had replied placidly, fishing for brown doughnuts with her long, hand-wrought iron fork. "It's one thing to cook when you've got everything to do with, and quite another when you are eternally figuring out how to make both ends meet. Of course, I don't have to do that. Land knows there's plenty to eat and more to, praise the Lord, but it's all plain food, and you've got to learn how to toss vegetables around in forty different ways out here if you want any variety."

That evening it was when the Board of Lady Managers discussed everything that lay ahead of them from the said vegetables to chickens, cows, horses, and farm implements.

Mr. Robbins had seemed relieved when he was sure that the Motherbird approved of the Mansion House. It was near Maple Lawn and Roxana, he said, and they would surely need both many times during their first experimental year in the country. Also, it was on the mail route, and not too large a place in acreage for them to handle. There was a good apple orchard, somewhat run down, but it would be all right with pruning and proper care. Besides, there were four good pear trees, two large cherry trees, white hearts and red, and three crabapple trees.

"Guess if you hunt around, you might find some quinces too, and plenty of berries and currants," Cousin Roxana said. "It's been let go to waste the past few years, and it'll take a year or more to get it back into shape. You'd better write out West and get a three-year lease, with option of purchase."

"We couldn't think of buying it, even with water rights and all," Mrs. Robbins demurred, "but we might try the three-year lease. What do you think, dear?"

"I should write tonight," Mr. Robbins told her, confidently. "Even if I should gain my health completely"--how cheerily he said it, the girls thought--"we could still stay up here summers, and you all would enjoy it, I know. Look at Dorrie's pink cheeks, and Jean looks like another girl. If I keep on much longer on Roxy's cooking, I expect to be mowing hay in the lower meadows by July."

So the letter was written, the wonderful letter freighted with so many hopes. All four girls escorted Mrs. Robbins down to the mailbox at the crossroads the next noon. It was truly a fateful moment, as Kit remarked solemnly. So much depended upon the nature of the answer from far-off Saskatoon. Perched on the fence rail Dorrie began to compose poetry to fit the occasion.

"Kit, beat time for me, will you?" she called happily, teetering on the rail like a young bluebird. "Here it goes now:

"Oh, Saskatoon,
Please answer soon!
Sweet Saskatoon,
We ask this boon--

What's his name, Mumsie?"

"Ralph McRae," Jean answered for her mother.

"You know, really, Dorrie," protested Helen, "if you could just see yourself on that rail fence chanting doggerel to the spring breezes, you'd come down."

But Doris kept to the rail all the same, and sang with her fair hair blowing around her little face, already showing freckles. Even Kit felt the inspiration of the moment.

"Oh, I love these April mornings! You can smell everything that's sweet and new in the air, can't you, Motherkin? And I found arbutus buds down in the pines too, and an old crow's nest, and the crocuses are up."

Mrs. Robbins lifted her face to the blue sky, with its great white clouds that drifted up from the south in an endless argosy of beauty, and quoted softly:

"When Spring comes down the wildwood way,
A crocus in her hair--"

"There comes the mail wagon down the wildwood way," Jean called from the curve of the road.

Already they had grown to watch for it as the one real event of the day. Mrs. Robbins said it reminded her of the little milk wagons in the South. It had a white oblong body with a projection at the back, a "lean-to" as Cousin Roxana called it, for parcel post packages. The top came forward over the front seat in a canopy effect to shield Mr. Ricketts, the rural free delivery carrier, from the sun. Finally, there was a plump white horse that matched the whole turnout exactly, and Mr. Ricketts, his cap pushed back on his head, a smile of perpetual well-being on his face.

"Looks like we'd get a spell of fine weather," he called. "Tell Miss Robbins I noticed a postcard for her about her subscription being up for her floral monthly, and if she ain't going to renew hers, I'll send in my own for this year."

"Now just hear that," exclaimed Cousin Roxy when she was given the message. "He's read my floral monthly regularly coming along the route. Well, I don't know as I mind. He's a real good mail carrier anyhow, and all men have failings. Hewers of wood and drawers of water, the good Book calls them, and I'd like to know what else the pesky things are for. That doesn't mean you at all, Jerry. You were always a good boy. Tom Ricketts knows better than to read my floral monthly without so much as by your leave, ma'am. But I'll renew it."

"He must have read the postcard too," said Helen.

"Read it?" Cousin Roxy sniffed audibly. "I'd like to see anything get by them down at that post office. They know a sight more about you than you do yourself. Postmaster Willets could sit down single-handed and write a history of the local inhabitants of this town just from memory and postcards, I don't doubt a mite."

The very next day the girls went again to the Mansion House. The keys were at Mr. Weaver's, the next house down the road from Maple Lawn. It was a regular gray mouse of a house sitting far back from the road and facing the western hills. Philemon Weaver lived there alone. He was ninety-one and had had six wives, Cousin Roxana told them.

"Though mercy knows, nobody holds that against him. It was a compliment to the sex, I suppose, if he could get them. And Uncle Philly's buried them all reverently and properly."

They found the old fellow working at a carpenter's bench out in the woodshed. His hair was gray and curly and his upper lip clean shaven. Doris said he looked just like the pictures of Uncle Sam. He was tall and lean and stoop-shouldered, but his blue eyes were full of twinkles and he had the finest set of false teeth, Kit remarked soberly, that she'd ever seen, and the most winsome smile.

"Winsome? Philly Weaver winsome?" laughed Cousin Roxana when she heard it. "Well, I must say, Kit, that is the greatest yet. Winsome!"

"But he is," Kit protested, "really winsome. He gave us each a drink from his well and showed Jean his Dutch tile stove and his grandfather's clock. And he's got the dearest old chest out in that side hall, Cousin Roxy. I asked him how much he'd take for it, and he said no, he guessed he'd better not, though it was worth as much as two dollars and a half, but it had been his great-grandmother's setting-out chest. Wasn't that dear of him?"

Armed with the key and waving good-bye to the old man at the top of the hill, they started down to the crossroads. Already they called the house home. It was so satisfying, Kit said, just to wander about the rooms and plan. There was one large southeast room that must be the living-room and library combined. Back of this, opening out on a wide side porch, was the dining-room. On the opposite side of the front hallway was a sitting-room with a glass-enclosed extension for flowers, and between it and the kitchen was a good-sized hallway lined with shelves and long handy drawers beneath them.

It was the kitchen and garret, though, that the girls lingered over most. The former extended across the entire back of the house and Helen counted eleven doors opening out of it. The floor was made of oaken planks worn smooth as satin, some of them over two feet wide. Behind the sheet iron partition, they found a huge old-fashioned rock fireplace with the crane still hanging in it. Helen and Doris could easily stand inside the aperture and there was a jutting out of the walls on each side that formed the cosiest kind of an inglenook.

"It seemed from this they e'en must be,
Each other's own best companie,"

quoted Kit, from "The Hanging of the Crane." "Where are you, Jeanie? You're missing thrills of discovery."

But Jean was getting her own thrills. She had gathered her skirts around her, and ventured down the old winding cellar steps, groped around in the dark until she found the outside doors and removed the big wooden bar that held them. The stone steps outside were green with moss, and an indignant toad hopped back out of the sunlight when she threw open the doors.

"We'll get the mouldy smell out of the cellar in a few days," she told the others, rolling up her sleeves and sitting down in the sunshine on the top step. "And there's a furnace down there, too. It looks old and rusty, but it's there. No wonder they called it the Mansion House with a real furnace in the cellar and running water in the kitchen sink. But how funny and New Englandy, girls, to call it that, doubling up on mansion and house. Let's name it something else, something piney."

"Valley View," suggested Helen.

"Sounds too slippery," Kit said. "How's Heart's Content? Too sentimental? Well then, Piney Crest. It is on a sort of crest or mount up here above the valley and the pines make it seem solemn."

"Well, they won't after we once get here," Doris declared. "Let's call it something happy."

Kit stood with arms akimbo, looking up at the tall tapering pines. They were splendid old lords of the conifers, towering as high as the cupola itself. Their branches spread out like great hoopskirts of green. Underneath was a thick silky carpet of russet needles, layer on layer from many seasons of growth. Beyond the limits of the garden lay the strip of white road, and across that came wide fields that seemed to fall in long waves to meet the river. On all sides they slipped away from the old mansion, their square borders outlined with the gray rock walls, each with its brave showing of springtime green, where every clambering vine had sent forth leafy tendrils, and even the moss had freshened up under the April showers.

"In a couple of weeks more they'll all be green," said Jean, her dark eyes bright with anticipation. "And we'll plough them and sow them, and they'll grow and grow, girls, and turn a real golden harvest over to us by fall. Blessed green acres of promise!"

"There you are," exclaimed Kit triumphantly, wheeling around on them. "Greenacres. It just fits the place, and it's full of the country and makes you think of good things to eat. Greenacres. All in favor of that name please signify in the usual manner."

Whereupon Doris picked up her skirts and made a low curtesy, and Helen did the same, and lastly Jean and Kit swept each other an elaborate court bow, showing that the vote was entirely unanimous.

Therefore, Greenacres was the new name given to the old Mansion House, and the girls felt that in the bestowal of the name, they held a guarantee with Fate of happy augury.

*CHAPTER X*

*SETTLING THE NEST*

"Goods have come," called Mr. Ricketts from the mail box one morning. The pink freight card lay on top, and he seemed as pleased as anyone to find it there. "Letter from out West too, I noticed, so I presume you folks will be settled pretty soon."

"I almost feel as if I ought to let him read what Mr. McRae says," Mrs. Robbins said amusedly. "He's so friendly and interested."

As she opened the letter, the girls gathered around her chair, eager-eyed and curious to see what it contained. Jean declared that she liked the handwriting because it was firm and plain without any flourishes. Kit was sure he used a stub pen and was rather morose and dignified. Helen asked if she might keep the postage stamp for a memento, and Doris kept patting her mother's shoulder tenderly as if she would have protected her against any disappointment.

"You read it, dear. I'd much rather you did," the Motherbird said, handing it over to Mr. Robbins.

Cousin Roxana was out in the buttery singing softly to herself about some day when the mists had rolled in splendor from the beauty of the hills, and the nurse was upstairs, packing to return to New York the following day. There was just their own little home group of robins and they listened anxiously for the verdict. The letter ran:

SASKATOON, SASKATCHEWAN,
April 4th, 19--.

_Mr. Jerrold Robbins, Gilead Center, Conn._

MY DEAR MR. ROBBINS: Your letter of March 28th, received. I should be very glad to rent the old house down at Stony Eddy on a lease, but do not want to let it go out of the family. Miss Robbins can tell you the conditions under which it came into my possession and why I am not at liberty to part with it. If you care to rent it at $100 a year, it is yours. Any necessary repairs it may need I am willing to make. I have never seen the property myself, but whatever Miss Robbins says about it will be satisfactory to me, as she was my Aunt Trowbridge's dearest friend.

Hoping if you decide to take the place, you may be happy there, I am,

Yours sincerely,
RALPH McRAE.

"It's ours," Jean breathed thankfully.

"I always felt that it was, somehow," Mrs. Robbins smiled happily around at her brood. "And I know you'll like it, Jerry."

"Oh, I know the place, I remember admiring it as a boy. Besides, I'd like anything up here. Why, I could live out yonder in Roxy's corncrib very comfortably this summer if she'd only let me," teased the invalid. "Better send a check out at once for the rent, Betty, and get into it as soon as possible."

It was the third week in April when they drove down in relays from Maple Lawn and took possession of the new home. There had been considerable repairing to be done: painting and papering, mending the waterpipes and furnace, and cleaning out the chimneys.

The goods had been brought up from Nantic by Hiram in the big hay wagon, he making four trips. Mrs. Robbins had wanted to hire an automobile truck from Norwich, but Roxana said it was all nonsense with two big horses standing idle in the barn just aching for work, and Hiram fussing around over frost still being in the ground so he couldn't do any deep ploughing. So the goods came up and were packed into the big front room downstairs while the girls and Mrs. Robbins went back and forth "settling."

Hiram's younger brother came to do the papering and painting. He looked exactly like a young rooster, Kit declared, all neck and legs, and he was fearfully shy. She found immediate diversion in appearing before him suddenly in her most abrupt manner and asking his opinion anxiously on something, whereupon Shad would blush intensely to the roots of his taffy colored hair, and splash paste blindly.

His name was Shadrach Farnum, but Shad suited him to perfection. As Cousin Roxana said, he did sort of run to bone. But he could paint and paper to the queen's taste and gradually the rooms began to look different. The big living-room was covered with a soft wood brown burlap that harmonized well with their ash furniture and bookcases, and the brown Spanish leather cushions. Window seats were built around the two bay windows, and the girls sewed diligently to cover the cushions for these with burlap, and to make inside curtains just to outline, as Jean said, the cream filet ones.

"It looks so warm and tender and friendly, doesn't it?" Doris exclaimed when the big brown suede cover was laid on the long library table and the copper lamp placed in the center. The copper lamp was really an institution in the Robbins' family. The girls had given it personal conduct from the Cove on Long Island to Nantic. Jean had found it in an old copper and brass shop in New York at a wonderful reduction, and had carted it home herself in triumph. The bowl was broad and low and squat, shaped a good deal like a summer squash. The shade was perforated by hand with exquisite artistry into strange Muscovite designs, through which the light shone softly. When it was lighted the first evening in the new home, Helen said she felt as if she were before a shrine.

"And it is a shrine too," Jean told them, "the shrine of home."

Once in the long ago when they had all been quite young, Jean had been found industriously writing names on bits of paper, and fastening them with mucilage to pieces of the furniture.

"I thought they might feel queer not having any names," she said when discovery came, "so I was naming them."

The lamp had a name too; it was always alluded to as Diogenes.

"It looks exactly like the kind of lamp he would have loved," Kit explained.

The day after they really moved in, Cousin Roxana drove down with Ella Lou and some good advice, a large brown crock of freshly baked beans and a loaf of brown bread.

"You need a good safe horse that you all can drive," she said. "Sam Willetts has a brown mare that seems just about the ticket. I telephoned over to him this morning and he'll sell her for $75.00, which isn't bad at all. If you like, Betty, I'll call him up again as soon as I get back and Honey Hancock can bring her over. Honey's working for Mr. Willetts now, and the mare used to belong to the Hancocks. She was a regular pet, Piney said."

Mrs. Robbins was sure it was a good plan and Cousin Roxana was instructed to close the bargain. So it was that Greenacres made the acquaintance of Honey Hancock, destined to be a close friend before summer was over, and always a family standby.

It was a little past the supper hour when Honey drove up. Hitched to the back of the wagon was the brown mare, and they all went out to look at her. Honey was about fourteen and tall for his age. Rosy-cheeked he was, with blue eyes and curly brown hair and dimples so deep and ingratiating that Helen said it was a burning shame to waste them on a boy.

He stood at the mare's head, patting her slender, glossy neck and combing her mane with his fingers, telling the girls her history, how she had belonged to Molly Bawn, their old mare, and how his father had broken her to harness himself.

"But she never had to be really broken in. Piney and I started riding her bareback when she was out in pasture and she was just as tame as a kitten. She understands anything you say to her. Mother hated to sell her to Mr. Willetts, but we had to, and as I was working for him, why, she didn't know any difference. She's used to a good deal of petting--"

"Oh, we'll all pet her here," Jean promised. "We must have something to drive her in. Haven't you a davenport that she'll drive nicely in?"

"A davenport!" exclaimed Kit. "Jean Robbins, a davenport's a sofa. She'd look nice hitched to a sofa. My sister isn't used to the country at all, Honey. She means a democrat, you know. The kind of a wagon you can put one seat or two on, and still have room to put things away in."

"We haven't anything like that," said Honey, "but they might have down at Mr. Butterick's. He's the carriage maker. He can take a pair of old carriage wheels, and turn out a good buggy almost while you watch him."

"You have wonderful people up here," Helen said fervently. "It seems as if whenever you want a certain kind of a person, there he is waiting for you. Where does Mr. Butterick live?"

"Down in Rocky Glen; second house past the basket weaver, Mr. Tompkins."

"Suppose we go over there tomorrow, girls," Jean suggested. "Or do you have to take the mare over, Honey, and let Mr. Butterick sort of fit her with a carriage and a harness? I wish I could put her in the barn right now."

"Better get somebody to take care of her first," Helen said practically. "We'd feed her fish cakes and doughnuts."

Honey shifted his weight from one foot to the other somewhat uneasily.

"Don't suppose you folks think of taking anybody on regularly, do you? Mother said I was to ask, and say if you wanted me I might come up. It's nearer home than Mr. Willetts' and there's only Piney and Mother at home, and they need me to do the chores after I get home at night."

Jean hastily signaled to Kit for fear she wouldn't remember all that Cousin Roxana had told them about Honey Hancock and his sister. But just then Mrs. Robbins stepped out on the side porch and smiled at Honey until he turned red and grinned delightedly.

"I could come for about ten a month, Mother thought," he vouchsafed with much embarrassment.

The other Mother thought ten was about right too, and Honey drove away in the spring twilight, happy as one of the barn swallows that circled in the dusk in a wonderful vesper dance. All the way up the hill they heard him whistling "Beulah Land," and the hearts of the girls echoed the sweet old melody. Although the deal had been closed over the brown mare, and the check reposed in Honey's overalls' pocket, he took her back with him, and promised to ride her over in the morning so the girls should not have the care of her over night.

"I asked him what her name was," Doris said, "and he told me they just called her Mollie's Baby. We must think up some wonderful name for her. You know, Mother darling, she looked over at me so tenderly and wistfully when Honey said she would have to go back over night. I know she longed to stay with us."

The next addition to the place was the lot of chickens. It had been agreed the first year that no large expenditures should be made for anything, because it was all more or less experimental.

"We want to take care of Dad, and make him well this first year," Jean told the other girls up in their room one night.

One point about the Robbins family that was different from other families was their distinctive individualities; they simply demanded separate expression, as Jean put it. Nobody liked to double up with anyone else, and here at Greenacres there were plenty of rooms to choose from, so that each daughter might have her own. Two large bed-rooms with alcoves crossed the front of the house. These had been turned over to Mr. and Mrs. Robbins. Then came curious rooms, as Kit said. The hallway rambled through the second story, two steps up over here and two steps down over there. There were unexpected little corridors opening out from it like crooked arms. It really was a fascinating hallway, and the rooms along it were quite exceptional. There were two wings to the house, and an extension at the back over the summer kitchen "ell." This was a source of delight to the girls, for they found all kinds of interesting relics tucked back in this extension.

"Mother dear," Helen said seriously, appearing one day with cobwebs in her hair and dust smudges on her arms and face, "we've found perfectly wonderful things. Old newspapers before the war, and old magazines with hoopskirts in them and bonnets with flowers inside the poke!"

"And two old maps dated 1829, one of New York State and one of Connecticut," Kit added. "Both mounted on old yellow homespun linen and braced with hand carved ebony. Now what do you think of that, Dad? I'll bring them down to you. And a thing that looks like a little pilot wheel, but it isn't. Jean says it's part of a spinning outfit because she's seen them out in front of antique shops on Madison Avenue in New York. And we found a foot warmer, and an hour glass with one support broken, and a tailor's goose, and some old clothes-pins that had been whittled by hand."

Jean selected the west room for her very own. It had a square bay window over the bower, as the girls had nicknamed the little conservatory off the dining-room. The upstairs window was smaller, but almost as pleasant, with small panes of glass and a beautiful outlook over the valley and the old dam.

Doris had a smaller room next to Jean's, and then came a pleasant southeast room for a guest chamber.

"And for pity's sake, let's make it comfy and cheery," said Kit. "Most guest chambers give you the everlasting dumdums, don't they, Jeanie? Let's make ours look as if it were really to enjoy."

Kit had taken for her special domicile the room over the summer kitchen, because it had so many shelves and cupboards in it. At first she had wanted the cupola room, but was talked out of it, much against her will and predilections. The upper staircase was circular, and you had to watch out going up to the cupola, or you'd get an unmerciful bump on the head as the door was very low. But once inside, it was a surprise, that held you spellbound for a minute. The room was square in shape, and had eight long narrow windows in it. From them you caught wonderful framed views of the far-reaching valley, the ruined stone mill, the great brown rock dam, covered now with the spring freshet, and beyond the placid lake with several islands dotting it and long rows of hills guarding its margins, one after the other like sentinels.

"Yes, I want this one," Kit had said. "I'm the only one in the family with genius and this should be mine. I want to walk around this crystal enclosure and play that I am one of Maeterlinck's sleeping princesses."

"They didn't walk," Jean had protested, "and you needn't imagine that you're a genius, Kit Robbins, because you're not."

"Well, I'm the only one in the family with much imagination anyway," Kit had answered pleasantly. "'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,' you know, Jeanie dear. And if I can't be a sleeping princess I will be the Lady of Shalott." Whereupon she had swept about the room with a couch cover draped around her in approved Camelot style, and a curtain cord bound about her brow for a circlet, declaiming:

"'Four gray walls and four gray towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle embowers,
The Lady of Shalott.'"

"It would be such a hard place from which to rescue you if the house caught fire," Helen had remarked thoughtfully, peering from one of the windows. "You couldn't very well skip down the lightning rod, Kit."

"I should prefer to have all my girls nearer to me," Mrs. Robbins had remarked. "Suppose you should be taken ill in the night! How would any of the rest know of it or be able to help you? You had better select a room on the floor below, Childie."

"Very well," Kit had said regretfully. "Of course I will not insist if the family are going to worry over me, but I shall come up here every day to comb out my golden tresses. I think we'll get Shad to build us window seats all the way around, stain the floor, and make a sort of sun parlor out of it."

"Oh, Kit, remember the place in Egypt we always wanted to see, the Ramasseum, the thinking place of the king?" Jean's dark eyes had sparkled with mischief. "Let's call this the Thinking Place. Then we can retire here when we wish to meditate, and fairly soak in the sunlight until we feel radiant and revived. Do you all like that?"

So it had been agreed upon and the cupola room became the thinking place of the four princesses.

Another discovery they made soon after was the Peace Spot. This was over on the hillside across the bridge. Here was a rocky field with any number of evergreen trees. They were assorted sizes and all varieties. There were juniper trees and hemlocks, fat tubby little spruces and slender straggly cedars. It looked like a premeditated burial ground, Kit remarked, but Helen named it the Peace Spot. They often walked over there in the late afternoons. Kit had ideas of turning it into a wonderful Italian garden some day, but just now it was their place of rest.

At first the housework had proved to be the great stumbling block in the way of perfect peace and daily comfort.

"I tell you, Motherbird, if you'll just say what you want done, we'll be your willing handmaidens," Jean had promised at the very beginning, but the willing handmaidens had found themselves tangled up in less than two days, treading on each other's heels and losing their tempers too.

Mrs. Robbins laughed at them when she happened in and found them all "looking down their noses," as Doris expressed it.

"Girls, you'll have to learn team work," she explained. It appeared that Jean had put a chicken to roast in the top of the double baking pan and the gravy had all run out of the air draft at one end. "You must learn that when you put your bread to rise it doesn't shape itself into loaves and hop into the pans and walk over to the oven." Here Kit blushed hotly, remembering how her first batch had risen to the occasion beyond all expectations, and rambled during the night all over the edge of the pan and the arm of the chair she had set it on. "And, Dorrie, precious, if you catch mice in traps alive, and then decide to tame them, we'll have mice all over the place."

Doris had discovered a nice little brown prisoner under the pantry shelf, had taken him out into the rose garden and there let him go, all in a spirit of lofty pity that left Kit and Jean speechless.

Also, Doris had taken to rescuing flies caught on sticky paper, putting them into pill boxes until they recovered their usual blithe and debonnaire attitude towards life. Also, sundry noises having issued from her room at night, the other girls had started down the dark hall to investigate, and had stepped on turtles which Doris had found sunning themselves on logs in the pond, and had put into empty tomato cans and smuggled up to her room for future humanitarian reference.

"Go for us, Queen Mother," Jean cried valiantly. "Go for us. It's the only way we'll ever learn anything. I told Kit to fix the bread a dozen times. I was reading up tomato plants, and Helen was cutting out a stencil for her scrim curtains--conventionalized tulips--"

"Lotos buds," corrected Helen.

"Well, I'm not sure. They look like raised biscuits to me. I wish spring would hurry along and make up its mind to stay a while." She pressed her nose against the window pane and stared out at the land. Letters had come from some girl friends back at the Cove that day, and she felt a wave of loneliness and half panic at what they had undertaken.

Just then Honey came to the kitchen door, bareheaded and smiling.

"Piney said for me to tell you folks that she heard Ma Parmelee had some good Plymouth Rocks for sale. They're about as reliable a hen as you can get. Ma's going to sell off everything and go to live with her son down in Nantic. It's near towards where I live, if you'd like to drive over that way."

Mrs. Robbins thought it was a good idea, and that Jean could go with her. There had been a trip over to Rocky Glen after the purchase of Mollie's Baby, and Mr. Butterick had been persuaded to part with a buggy that just fit the mare. It was low and held three easily on its broad cushioned seat, and there was a fair space at the back where odds and ends could be packed away.

It seemed rather foolish to call the mare Mollie's Baby every time they spoke to her, so a family council had given her a brand new cognomen and already she pricked up her ears when she heard it. They called her Princess, and the Jersey heifer that came up from the State farm was called Buttercup, after her famous predecessor. Buttercup was Mr. Robbins' special pride on the farm and great things were hoped from her.

Jean gathered up the reins and Honey put some burlap sacks in the back of the wagon for the hens.

"Better tie them to something when you start off," he advised. "They always flop around a lot in sacks."

It was a drive of about two and a half miles, up through the hills. Each new road seemed to lead them straight up to the edge of the world and then to dip again and leave cloudland behind. The woods held a haze of green now that hung over the distant hills like a mist. Once a row of young quail blinked dizzily from a pasture bar at the surprising apparition of the horse and buggy. And all at once there came the quick thud of hoofs behind them, and a young girl riding horseback drew rein beside their buggy. She was about as old as Kit, with thick brown hair brushed back boyishly from her face, and big friendly blue eyes.

"How do you do," she said, blushing in a way that seemed familiar to them, for it reminded them of Honey. "I'm Piney Hancock. Mollie wouldn't let me ride by unless I stopped to let her see Babe."

*CHAPTER XI*

*MA PARMELEE'S CHICKS*

"Oh, we're ever so glad to know you, Piney," Jean said at once. "Honey's told us all about you until we felt that we really did know you."

Piney blushed deeper than ever, just as Honey did, and brushed a fly off her pony's neck. She rode across saddle, in a home-made corduroy skirt, with a boy's cap set back on her head, and a boyish waist with knotted tie. Altogether both Mrs. Robbins and Jean approved of her at sight, for she seemed like a girl edition of Honey himself.

Piney told them they were on the right road, and to keep to the left after they passed the burial ground.

"I'm going down the other way or I'd ride along and show you where it is."

"You must come down to see us girls when you can, please. We're rather lonesome, not knowing anyone around here. Are there many girls?"

"Quite a few," said Piney. "There are the Swedish girls over on the old Ames place, and there are two French girls near us. Their father's the carpenter, Mr. Chapelle. Etoile's the older one and the little one they call Tony. Her name's really Marie Antoinette. Mrs. Chapelle's awfully funny. She told me one day the reason they changed the little girl's name to Tony was because if she ever should get on a railroad track or anywhere in danger, and they had to call her in a hurry, they wanted something short and quick to say. She talks broken English, and it was so comical the way she said it." Piney's deep dimples were showing and her eyes were sparkling, as she imitated the voice of Mrs. Chapelle. "How I say to her ver' fast Marie Antoinette, Marie Antoinette, Marie Antoinette! She can be dead four--five--time. I call her that way, I tink so. I yell Ton-ee! Right away she jump."

"Isn't she a darling, Mother?" Jean exclaimed when they drove on. "I do hope she'll come down. Kit would love her."

"Anybody would love her," agreed Mrs. Robbins, still smiling. "You know, Jean, I think that you girls are going to find a special work up here that only you can do. A work among these girls of our own neighborhood."

"But, Mother dear, our own neighborhood up here means a radius of about ten miles."

"Even so. Cousin Roxana's old doctor covers twenty miles and has been doing it for forty years; he knows all of the families as if he were a census taker."

Jean thought for a minute. They were going up a long hill and Princess took her time. Honey had fastened two bunches of ferns to her bridle to keep away flies, and she looked as if she wore a Dutch bonnet.

"There seem to be so few real American girls up here, Mother," Jean began slowly. "I thought we'd find ever so many, but while I lived up at Maple Lawn I rode around a good deal, and you'd be surprised how many foreigners are up here. Cousin Roxy told me the reason. The old families die out, or the younger generation moves away to the towns, and the foreigners buy up the old homesteads cheaply."

"Well, dear?"

"But, Mother, you don't understand. There are all sorts. French Canadians, and a Swedish family, and a Polish family, and the old miller up the valley from us used to be a Prussian sailor. Then there are the real old families, of course--"

"Do you think of confining your circle of acquaintances to the old families, Jeanie?"

Jean laughed at the amusement in her mother's voice.

"I know what you're thinking, Mother, dear. Still I suppose we must be careful just moving into a new place like this. We don't want to get intimate with everybody. You'll like some of the old families."

"I think I'll like some of the new ones too. Have you noticed, Jean, in driving around, that the houses which are mostly unpainted and rather run-down looking belong to the old timers, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, probably, of first settlers?"

"Oh, Mother, there are some of the most interesting stories about them too, how they came out--walked, actually walked most of them--from the Massachusetts Bay Colony when there was some sort of a break up, and a few dropped off here, and a few there, and they settled in hamlets wherever they happened to stop. I found a burial ground in the woods near Cousin Roxy's, with old slate gravestones, and dates away back to 1717."

"I'd like to see them, dear, but at the same time they were foreigners too, or children of foreigners, immigrants from a far land. Can't you understand what I mean? These newer families are like new blood to the country. It takes only a couple of generations to blend them in, Jean, and they bring new strength to us. Think what we get from the different nations. I remember out in California I had a wonderful girl friend whose people had been Polish exiles. That was a strange group of exiles who sought a haven in our land of flowers. There was Sienkiewicz the great novelist, and splendid Helena Modjeska, and many whose names I forget. Wanda was my girl friend's name, and my Mother and aunts did not like me to chum with her because she was a foreigner. I think that you children are very fortunate to be born in an age when these queer old earth lines, these race barriers, are falling down, and leaving the world-brotherhood idea instead. Up here in our lonely old hills, we are going to face this same problem that all nations are coping with, and we in our small way can help open the gates of the future."

"Why, Mother, I never heard you talk this way before," Jean exclaimed. "You always seemed just dear and sweet, don't you know. I--why, somehow I never felt you were interested in such things."

Unconsciously, she moved a little nearer to this new kind of Mother, and Mrs. Robbins' hand closed over hers.

"If we mothers are not interested in them, who should be?" she asked, her eyes full of a beautiful tenderness and compassion. "Some one has called us the torch bearers, the light bringers, but I like to think of women best as the tenders of the ever-burning temple lamps."

"You mean love and truth and--"

"I mean everything, dear, that tends for world betterment. And you girls are going to do your little share right here in Gilead Center, making a circle that shall join together the hands of all these girls from different races. We'll give a party soon and get acquainted with them all. Now let's pay attention to chickens, for I think this must be the house."