Chapter II: Part 2

“Dad says it will pay nearly all moving expenses and keep us for months. What else could he do? Besides, we’ll still have one car, that’s enough. At least we won’t be completely marooned. He’d sell that one too only it’s an absolute necessity to have one. We’re going to have to buy a trailer, too, for hauling things. Anyway I want a horse to ride, don’t you, Kit?”

“Isn’t it queer,” Doris broke in, “when a father breaks down, it just seems as if a home caves in.”

“Well, it doesn’t do any such thing, Doris,” responded Kit stolidly. “It may seem to, but it doesn’t. Even if we are going to live five miles from nowhere with the eye of Rebecca forever resting upon us, there’ll be lots of fun ahead. What’s that about the world making a pathway to your door? I’m going to be famous some day and there’ll be a nice, well-worn path leading from New York up to Elmhurst, worn by the feet of faithful admirers.”

“It’s so nice having one genius in the family,” Jean answered, leaning her chin on one hand. “Now I don’t mind leaving the house behind, or the car, or anything like that. But it’s the people I like best that I can’t take up with me. Who will we know there, I wonder?”

“Human beings anyhow,” Doris stated. “We’ll make oodles of new friends. Besides, lots of the girls have promised to visit us. We’re not going to be lonesome.”

6. Pulling Up Stakes

It had been suggested that Kit and Jean stay behind to finish their schooling. They could board at the Phelpses’ home next to Sandy Cove along the shore road, but both girls begged to go with the family.

“Why don’t you stay?” advised Doris. “You’ll escape all of the moving and settling and ploughing.”

“We don’t want to escape anything,” said Kit firmly. “It isn’t any fun being left behind with the charred remains.”

“Oh, Kit, don’t call them that, it’s gruesome.”

“I don’t care. I feel gruesome when I think of being left behind. How do you suppose we’d feel to walk past the Cove and not see any of the rest of you around?”

“It’s better than being cut right bang off in the middle of everything,” replied Doris, with one of her rare explosions. “But everything,” she repeated tragically. “I can’t finish a single thing and I know I’ll never pass, being switched off to gosh knows what sort of a school.”

“Let’s not grouch anyway,” reminded Jean. “Mom’s getting thinner every day. As long as it’s got to be, let’s be cheerful about it.”

“I do wish that Kit wouldn’t be so happy about things that make you just miserable,” grumbled Doris.

Kit danced away down the hallway crooning:

“Night and day,
You are the one.
Only you beneath the moon
And under the sun.”[1]

“You’re an old tease, Kit,” Jean admonished in her very best big-sister style. “Please keep away from that crate of dishes.”

It had been decided to send Mr. Craig up before the moving, so he could have a week or two of rest at Maple Grove, Rebecca’s home. The latter was diligently sending down descriptions of adjacent farms and all sorts of home possibilities, but none seemed to fit the bill. Either there was too much land or not enough, or it was too far from the village or not far enough, or too much room or not room enough.

“For gosh sake,” Kit said one night, after all the family had suggested various possible houses, “let’s all tent out and do summer light housekeeping. We’ll never find just what we want—never, Mom. Jean wants a rose garden. I want at least a tennis court, even if we have to remove the hay fields. Doris wants wisteria arbors and a very large vine-covered porch. Tommy wants a dog, four cats, a hive of bees, a calf, and a pony. You want a house facing south, far back from the road, barn not too near, dry cellar, porch, century-old elms for shade, modern kitchen, indoor plumbing, and option of purchase, not over sixty-five dollars a month.”

“What do you want, Dad?” asked Jean. It was one of her father’s good days, when he was able to sit up in his big lounge chair before the fire in the bedroom, and be one of the family circle with them.

“Peace and rest,” smiled Mr. Craig.

“Me too,” Kit agreed, kneeling beside his chair and rubbing her head up and down his arm. “Dad and I are going to seek glorious peace the livelong day under some shady chestnut tree.”

“Dad may, but you won’t, Kathleen,” Jean laughingly warned. “It’s going to be a family project and you’ll have to do your share.”

“Wish we were going to an island,” Doris said wistfully. “I’ve always felt as if I could do wonders with an island.”

“Anybody could. There’s some chance for imagination to work on an island, but what can you do with a farm in Elmhurst?” Kit looked pensive with her head on one side, eyes half closed in melancholy anticipation. “Darling, precious old Dad here doesn’t know a blessed thing about farming—”

“Now, Kit, go easy,” Mr. Craig chided. “After all, I was born and raised on a farm. I should have learned something about it, I expect.”

“We’ll all be scouring pots, Kathleen,” offered Jean. “It’s the Craigs’ destiny. You know, Dad, I thought all along that Lydia would go with us. I thought she’d feel hurt if we didn’t take her, after she’d been telling us all these fairy tales about her native land where she loved to milk twenty cows at three A. M. I thought she’d simply leap at the chance of rural delights, and now she isn’t going along with us at all. She says she won’t go anywhere unless there are streetcars, tall buildings, and movies. It’s going to be tough without her.”

“Oh, I don’t believe it’s going to be nearly as bad as we expect,” Mrs. Craig said happily, as she passed through the room with her favorite silver candlesticks in her hands. “We’re facing the summer, remember, and I can’t help thinking that Rebecca will be a regular bulwark of strength to all of us.”

By the second week in March word came from the family’s bulwark that she thought the weather was mild enough for Jean and Mr. Craig to attempt the trip. Accordingly, the first section of the caravan set out on its trip to the land of oblivion, as Kit called it.

“It does seem, Mom,” Jean said at the last minute, “as if Kit ought to go with Dad, and let me stay down here to help you close up things. Kit knows how to drive.”

“I’d rather have you with your father.” Mrs. Craig laid her hands tenderly on Jean’s slender shoulders. “If I can’t be with him, I’d rather have the little first mate. Remember how he used to call you that, when you were only Tommy’s size?”

“Well, I feel terribly grown up now, Mother. Seventeen is really the dividing line. You begin to think of everything in a more serious way, you know. When I look at Kit and Doris sometimes, it seems years and years since I felt the way they do, so sort of irresponsible.”

“Poor old grandma.” Mrs. Craig laughed as she kissed her.

Jean had to laugh too, seeing the comic side of her aged feeling, but it was true that she felt a new sense of responsibility when they left New York for Elmhurst. The Saturday following their departure, the first carload of household goods left Sandy Cove. It had been a difficult job, weeding out the necessities from the luxuries, as Kit expressed it. Many a semi-luxury was slipped in by the girls on the plea that Father might need it, or would miss it. Kit had managed to save all the furniture from the study on this excuse.

“Books and pictures are necessities,” she declared firmly, saving a still life done in water colors. “This, for instance, has always hung over the desk, hasn’t it? Could we separate them? I guess not. In it goes, Doris, and see that you handle it with care. There’s one thing that we can take up with us and nothing can get it away from us, either, that’s atmosphere. Even if we have to live in a well-shingled, airy barn, we can have atmosphere.”

“Don’t laugh, Tommy,” Doris admonished as he dove into a mass of pillows. “Kit doesn’t mean that sort of atmosphere. She means—”

“I mean living with a copper vase. Miss Carruthers, our teacher at the art class, told us a story the other day about a woman she knew who was married to a band leader and they had to travel continually, living only in hotel rooms. She had a copper vase that she took wherever they went. She said even one familiar object like that, in strange surroundings, was the difference between living and just existing. Just think of Dad’s face if we can blindfold him, lead him into a lovely sunny room up there, take off the bandage, and let him find himself right in his own study just as he had it down here!”

“And as long as he’s going to stay in bed or lie on a couch he’ll never know what the rest of the house is like,” added Doris.

“But he’s not going to stay in bed, we hope,” answered their mother, catching up Tommy for a quick kiss, and for once he didn’t protest. “That’s why we’re going up there, to get him out into the sunlight as soon as possible, so he’ll get quite well again.”

Kit passed down the stairs completely covered with the burden which she bore. “I’ve got all the drapes, tablecloths, slipcovers, and underneath this load is me,” she called. “We may have to turn the attic into a cosy corner before we get through. It’s all in the effect, isn’t it, Mom?”

“I’m sorry that Dad sold your car, that’s all,” Doris remarked. Doris was the farsighted one of the family. “Bruce Pearson says he knows we could have gotten fifteen hundred for it just as easy as not. His mother told him it was worth every penny of fifteen hundred, and Dad let it go for eight hundred just because he liked the Phelpses.”

“Doris, dear, eight hundred cash is worth more than fifteen hundred promised,” Mrs. Craig said, smiling over at her. “And the car is several years old. I’m glad with all my heart that Mr. Phelps bought it, because they’ve been wanting one very much, and the children will get so much pleasure out of it.”

The children looked down at her admiringly, almost gloatingly, as she sat back contentedly in the low slipper chair in the sunny window.

“Mother, you’re a regular darling, truly you are,” Kit exclaimed. “You’re so big and fine and sympathetic that you make us feel like two cents sometimes when we’ve been selfish. Why do you look so happy when everything’s going topsy-turvy?”

Mrs. Craig held up a letter that Tommy had just brought in from the mailbox.

“Rebecca writes that Father stood the trip well and has slept every night since they reached Maple Grove. Isn’t that worth all the automobiles in the world?”

The eight hundred dollars in cash had been a helpful addition to their bank account. During the past few weeks, the girls and Tommy had learned what it meant to consider money, something they had never given a thought to before. While they had never been rich, they never had wanted, and never a suggestion of retrenching on expenses until now. Once they understood the situation, however, they all seemed to enjoy helping to solve the family problem. For several days Tommy had appeared to have something on his mind. Finally, he came in smiling and opened his hand, disclosing a ten-dollar bill. Kit staggered over to fall into a chair.

“Tommy, you mustn’t give your poor old sister sudden shocks like that in these days,” she exclaimed. “Where did you find that?”

“I sold Jiggers to Bruce Pearson,” Tommy replied, his eyes shining like stars. “He’s been asking and asking for him ever since I got him, and now I’ve done it. There’s ten dollars I got all by myself to help Dad.”

Neither Kit nor Doris spoke, but they regarded the youngest member of the family with the deepest pride and affection. Jiggers was a cocker spaniel puppy, the special property of Tommy, and they knew just what it took to part with him. Mrs. Craig took the crisp green bill from Tommy’s hand, while the tears slowly gathered on her lashes.

“It’s perfectly splendid of you, dear,” she said.

Tommy beamed and put his hands into his pockets. The family noticed that he kept carefully avoiding the window for outside was where Jiggers’ little kennel had stood. There are some things the heart cannot quite bear.

Much debating was held over the piano. The children loved it and declared it could not be true economy to part with it. It was a baby grand that they had had ever since the Riverside apartment days in town. Doris said she wanted to continue her practicing even if she couldn’t take any more lessons.

“Listen, Mom,” Kit said finally, “you know what I told you about the copper vase. That precious old piano is a copper vase and we’ll starve our inmost souls if we try to live without it. Why, we’ve loved it and pounded it for years.”

So it was boxed and shipped to Elmhurst as a copper vase, together with many another disguised necessity.

“They’ve turned into arrant smugglers,” Mrs. Craig wrote her husband. “And I cannot blame them, because I catch myself doing the same thing, packing things I should not take, and making myself believe they are essential. I’m sure I don’t see where we are ever to put everything in a farmhouse.”

Rebecca brightened up and smiled when that portion of the letter was read aloud to her. She was sitting in a straight-backed, split-bottomed chair by the south window in the sitting room, sorting out morning-glory and nasturtium seeds and putting them into old baking powder cans.

“Guess Margie’ll buck up some when she sees the house we think she will like,” she said.

7. Country Bound

While some of the Long Island farms had begun to look faintly green by the end of March, not a blade or a leaf was unfurled anywhere around Elmhurst. There was a feeling of spring in the air with a promise of buds ready to open.

Jean put on her yellow topper, tied a scarf over her head and put on a pair of pigskin gloves. She was waiting for Matt to drive around from the garage with the car and Ella Lou, Becky’s big tan and white collie. Matt was Rebecca’s hired help, smooth-faced and lean, somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty. He took care of three horses and two cows and worked the farm with outside help in busy seasons.

Ella Lou was a lovable dog who followed Becky wherever she went and since Jean’s arrival, she had taken to tagging her footsteps too. She knew every road in the township. Not a thing could be changed that Ella Lou did not take note of the fact the next time she passed by.

Today when Matt drove up with her, she was standing in the back seat with her muzzle hanging out of the window. She acted as wise and knowing as could be, turning her head around to look at Jean and barking just as if she was saying “We’re going after them at last, aren’t we?”

Becky stood at the screened pantry window, mixing pie crust. She leaned down and called some last advice as Jean got into the car and adjusted the rear view mirror.

“Park beside the express office, Jeannie. There’s usually plenty of room to park there. And have the girls and Tommy sit on the back seat ’cause them springs are kind of giving way, and your Mother’s nervous. And bring up a bulb for the hall light from the Mill Company Store. No, never mind,” just as Jean stepped on the starter, “’cause they don’t carry them, come to think of it. Goodbye. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble finding the way. Just keep on the main highway and you’ll get there.”

Jean laughed and waved her hand. It was the first time she had driven since she had come to Elmhurst and Becky was a little apprehensive about letting her go alone.

Maple Grove stood just at the crossroads, a white comfortable-looking house, one-and-a-half stories high, with a long low “ell” hitched on to the back, and a white woodshed leaning up against it for company.

Four great rock maples grew before its spacious lawn like a row of Titan sentinels. The Baltimore orioles and robins nested in them and contended with the chipmunks for squatter’s rights.

The house stood on a hill that faced the sunset. Down from the orchard sloped corn fields and rye fields. Below the winding white road was a deep ravine where a brook ran helter-skelter by hilly pastures until it slipped away into the cool shade of a quiet glen, sweet-scented with hemlock and spruce.

In the distance, hill after hill rose in mellowed beauty, each seeming to lean in sisterly fashion against the next taller one. The course of Little River could be traced down through the valley by its fringe of willows and alders. For perhaps fifteen miles it rambled, winding in and out around little islands, dodging old submerged trees that lifted skeleton arms in protest, spreading out above some old rock dam into a tiny lake, then dashing like some wild thing being chased through a mill run and out again into low, moist meadows, thick with flag and rushes.

At a point about a mile below the house stood the old Barlow lumber mill. Ella Lou barked at a dog as they passed by. Jean drove leisurely, knowing she had plenty of time. Once she put on the brakes suddenly when she saw a shadowy brown shape that skitted across the road in front of the car. She wondered whether it was a rabbit or a muskrat. Already she was catching the country spirit. Little objects of everyday life held a meaning for her and she found herself watching eagerly for new surprises as she drove along the old river road. How the kids would love it all, she thought, with a little tightening of her throat. It might be a little lonesome at first, but surely it was, as Becky said, a peaceful countryside.

The final decision on the new home site was to be left to her mother. Several places had been selected with a leaning toward Woodhow, but, as Becky suggested, Margie must be left unbiased to form her own opinion, although according to her way of thinking, no sensible person with half their wits could pass over the merits of Woodhow, or the wonderful opportunities it presented.

“It’s going to rack and ruin and it fairly cries out for somebody to take hold of it and get it in shape,” she had said. “I don’t know but what I’d drive by it if I were you, Jeannie, on your way back from the station, even if it is a little out of your way, just to see the look on your mother’s face when she sees it.”

It was a drive of seven miles down to Nantic, the nearest railroad station. Jean made it in good time and parked beside the express office, as Becky had suggested. Already, it appeared, Mr. Briggs, the station master, knew Jean, and smiled over at the trim, city-like figure pacing up and down on the platform waiting for the Willimantic train. This was the side line up to Providence that connected with the Boston express from New York.

“Expecting some of your family up?” asked Mr. Briggs pleasantly. Nobody could say that friendly interest in strangers and their affairs was not evinced around Nantic. It was part of the joy of life to Mr. Briggs to locate their general intentions.

“My mother and sisters and brother,” Jean answered happily.

“Figure on staying awhile, do they?”

She nodded rather proudly. “We’re going to live here. We’re Miss Craig’s cousins. You’ll have the freight car up with our goods this week.”

“Like enough,” said Mr. Briggs encouragingly. “Yes, I knew you belonged to Becky. I’ve known Becky herself since she was knee-high to a toadstool. There comes your local.”

Around the hillside bend of track came the train, the wonderful train that was bringing Mother and Doris and Kit and Tommy up out of the world of uncertainty and trouble into this haven of blossoming hopes. It seemed to Jean as if seconds turned to minutes. She wanted to stretch out both her arms to it as it slowed down and puffed, but there on the last car she caught a glimpse of Kit, one foot all ready to hop off, waving one hand and hanging on with the other.

“Oh, Mom darling,” Jean cried joyously, once she had them all safe on the platform. “It’s so beautiful up here, and Dad’s looking better every day. He sits up for a while now, and the old doctor told us the only thing that ailed him was a little distemper. Isn’t that a riot? Where are your trunks?”

But this was Mr. Brigg’s cue to come forward, hat in hand, and be introduced, so he took the baggage under his own personal supervision. It appeared that you never could tell anything about when trunks were liable to show up once they got started for Nantic, but, barring accidents, they’d come up on the six o’clock train, and there wasn’t a bit of use putting any reliance on that either, ’cause they might not show up till the milk train next morning.

“Hope you’ll like it up here,” was his parting remark, as they drove up the hill road, and Kit called back that they liked it already, much to Mr. Brigg’s delight.

Mrs. Craig sat on the front seat, both as the place of honor and in remembrance of Rebecca’s warning against the back springs. At the top of the hill Jean stopped the car, so they could look back at the little town. There was the huge one-story stone mill, covering acres of ground, with immense ventilators looking like those on steamships or like strange uprearing heads of prehistoric reptiles.

The little crooked main street could be traced by its lines of buildings, and back in a mass of trees stood the old French convent. Scattered everywhere were the houses of the mill workers, all of a uniform pattern, painted white with green blinds, and a patch of green yard to each.

Jean, flushed and proud of her responsibility, turned to pat Ella Lou’s head, then started the car and headed for home. The maple buds were swelling and looked rosy red against the thickets of dark shiny green laurel. Behind them rose slim lines of white birches.

“How far is it, Jeannie?” asked Doris. Just then the road came out on another hilltop overlooking the big reservoir. “Oh, look, look, kids,” she cried. “Isn’t it like a bit of out West, Mom? All those rocks and pines.”

“I’d rather have these gorgeous hills than all the mountains going,” Kit declared with her usual forcefulness. “We seem to be going up higher and higher all the time.”

“So we are,” Jean told her. “It’s a steady rise from New London to Norwich, then up to our own Quinnebaug hills. Are you warm enough, Mom?”

“Plenty,” said Mrs. Craig happily. “Though it is ever so much cooler here than on Long Island, isn’t it?”

“We’ve got an open log fire in your room all ready for you,” Jean replied. “You can just sit and toast away to your heart’s content.”

“For gosh sake, who ever had the courage to carry all the rocks for these stone walls?” asked Kit.

“Those are the stones that were ploughed up when the land was cultivated,” answered Jean. “The land here is particularly stony, so instead of wooden fences, the farmers use the stones they uncover for marking off their boundaries. Our house will probably have them too.”

“Oh, how you talk, dear,” laughed Mrs. Craig. “When we haven’t even a home yet. You’d think there was a baronial estate waiting for us.”

“There is,” Jean answered mysteriously. “Becky and I think that we’ve found the right place. Dad hasn’t seen it, of course, but I found it, and Becky said we couldn’t get it because somebody’d died, and it had gone to people out West.”

“Which gave our precious old Jean a chance to delve into mystery,” Kit suggested. “Yes, yes, go on, kid. You’re killing us with suspense. What did you find out?”

“Oh, I found him,” said Jean, enthusiastically. “He lives away out West in Saskatoon, and has never even seen this place, so he’s willing to sell it for almost nothing, $4,000, and even that includes the water power.”

Kit shook her head deploringly.

“Listen to the poor child, Mom. She chats of thousands as if they were split peas and she was making soup.”

“Shut up, Kit. He’ll rent it for sixty-five dollars a month, timber rights reserved excepting for our own use, and we can sell the hay.”

“How many rooms, dear?” asked Mrs. Craig.

“Seven,” replied Jean. “They call it Woodhow and I think it’s a beautiful name.”

“Where is it?” Doris inquired cautiously.

“When can we move in?” Tommy asked practically.

“Well, you can see the roof, I think, as soon as we get up to the top of Peck’s Hill. I’ll stop then. It’s fearfully lonesome, and maybe you’d rather be in the village. Becky says that some people do say—”

“Make her shut up,” Kit exclaimed. “Jean, you’re talking exactly like Becky. Isn’t she, Mother?”

“Never mind, dear. Go right on,” comforted Mrs. Craig, smiling at the eager young face beside her. Three weeks at Maple Grove had surely taken a lot of the spread out of Jean’s sails.

“I don’t think we’d be one bit lonely. It’s about a mile from Maple Grove, and half a mile from Mr. Peck’s place down the valley, and the mail goes right by the door. And there’s an old ruined stone mill on an island, and a waterfall, and a bridge, and big pines along the terrace in the front yard. It does need painting, I suppose, and shingling in spots, and the porch lops a little bit where it needs shoring up, Matt told me—” Jean stopped for breath.

“Specify Matt,” Doris asked mildly. “We don’t know a thing about Matt, Jeannie.”

“He’s the hired man, and he can do anything.”

“But, dear,” interrupted Mrs. Craig, “can’t you realize that there must be something wrong with it or it never would be rented for such a sum.”

“Oh, there is,” Jean replied promptly. “It’s too far from the railroad or village, and the mill burned down six years ago, and the owner died from the shock of losing everything he had, and there it stands, going to rack and ruin, Becky says, waiting for the Craigs to appear and turn it into a home.”

“How about school?” asked Kit suddenly.

Jean waved her hand grandly.

“Who wants a school out here? But if you’re so set on one, there’s a school over at the Gayhead crossroads. There’s a school bus that picks the kids up and takes them home again at night.”

“Jean has us all moved and settled already,” Mrs. Craig said. “I’m sure I’d like to be near where Rebecca lives.”

“Well, there it is,” Jean exclaimed happily. Ella Lou pricked up her ears and started to whine excitedly. Down one little hill, up another, over a culvert, and suddenly there appeared white chimneys rising above an apple orchard at the top of the hill.

“There it is,” she said, pointing to it with her hand. “Seven miles from nowhere, but right next door to heaven.”

8. The House on the Hill

The following morning Miss Craig said she thought she would drive down to Woodhow with Margaret Ann herself, and they’d look it over.

“If you children feel like coming down, why don’t you walk over. You can take the short cut through the woods. It’s not far. Like enough you’ll find some bloodroot out by now and saxifrage too. Don’t be like Jean, though. The other day she came up from the brook and said she’d found a calla lily, and it was just skunk cabbage.”

So the girls and Tommy took the short cut through the woods. They were just beginning to show signs of spring. The trees were bare, but under the dry leaves they found the new life springing. It was all new and interesting to them. Down at the Cove they had been in a beautiful part of Long Island but it was all restricted property. Here the woods and meadows spread for miles in every direction. Every pasture bar seemed to invite one to climb over it and explore. And where the woods ended in rocky pastures and wide spreading fields, they came out to a spot where they overlooked Woodhow and its grounds.

Becky and Mrs. Craig were there before them. The side door stood hospitably open and Ella Lou was lying on the front porch just as though she belonged there. It was a curiously interesting old place. First of all, a rock wall enclosed the grounds, with rock columns at the two entrance gates. These were wide, for the drive entered on one side, wound around the house, and came out on the other road, as the house stood at a corner.

The house itself looked like a glorified farmhouse, although it was hard to place it in the history of architecture.

“I think perhaps it started out to be Mid-Victorian with that general squareness and the porch,” said Mrs. Craig.

“That isn’t Mid-Victorian, Mother darling,” Jean interposed. “That’s the Reaction Period in New England. First of all none of the Puritan Women had any time to sit out on porches, so all the houses were made plain-faced. Then after the war they began to turn their minds to lighter things, so they stuck a cupola up here, and tacked on a little porch there, and gave the windows fancy eyebrows, and little scalloped wooden lace ruffles along the edges of the eaves. Isn’t that so, Becky?”

“Well, I declare, Jeannie,” laughed Becky, “maybe you’re right. I’d say, though, it was mostly a hankering after modernization. I don’t set much store by it myself, so long as I’ve got plenty of flowering shrubs around a house, and climbing vines. That makes me think, you’ve got a sight of them here, flowering quince and almond, and peonies, and all sorts of hardy annuals. There used to be a big border of them, I remember, at the back of the house, and behind it was an old-fashioned rose garden.”

“A rose garden!” Kit and Doris gasped.

“Let’s go and see if we can find it,” cried Jean.

Back they went to find it, and after hunting diligently through hazel bushes and upspringing weeds, they found one terrace that dipped into a sunken space once walled in. Now the tumbled gray rocks had half fallen down, and some were sunken in the earth. But still they found some old rose bushes, and several of the large bushes looked hopeful. There was a flagged walk with myrtle growing up between the stones, and a tumble-down arbor that Tommy declared looked exactly like a shipwrecked pilothouse off some boat.

Doris, sitting down on the broad front steps, was listening to the music of falling water in the distance and the wind overhead in the great, slumberous pines. There were four of these, two on each side of the long terrace, with rock maples down near the rock wall and several pear and cherry trees. Along the terrace were flower beds, three on each one, outlined with clam shells.

“Miss Trowbridge used to have gladiolus set out in those beds, with pansies and sweet alyssum set around the edges, and outside again, old-hen-and-her-chickens. They looked real pretty.”

“Who was Miss Trowbridge, Becky?” asked Mrs. Craig. She sat beside Jean, her hands clasped lightly in her lap, her hat lying beside her. There was a look of content on her face, a look that had been a stranger there for many months. Tommy tossed a spray of half-blossomed cherry twigs in her lap and ran away again.

“She was sister to the Trowbridge that owned the mills. She married some man out in Canada, lived awhile out there, then gave up and died. She never did have much backbone that I could see, but she loved flowers. Did you notice a big glass bay window off the dining room? She called that her conservatory. I remember asking her once if it was her ‘conversationary,’ and how she did laugh at me! Well, every one can’t be expected to know everything. It’s all I can do to keep up with Elmhurst these days. Her name was Francelia and she married a McRae.”

“But who had the place after she and her brother died?”

Rebecca never believed in directness when it came to genealogies. She delighted in them, and would slip her glasses down to the middle of her long nose, elevate her chin, and go after a family tree like a government forester.

“Well, according to my way of thinking, it should belong to Sally Hancock and her brother Buzzy. His name’s Seth, but they call him Buzzy. Their mother was Luella Trowbridge, sister to Francelia and Tom who owned the mills, but she married Clint Hancock against everybody’s word, and her father cut her off in his will, and never saw her from the day she was married. Tom did the same, but Francelia used to go over and see her after Sally and Buzzy were born. They live down near Nantic. You must have passed the house, little bit of a gray one with rambler roses all over it, and a well sweep at one side. The property went to Francelia after Tom died, and she had one boy. He’s out in Northwest Canada now and don’t give a snap of his finger for this place, when there’s Sally and Buzzy loving it to death and can’t hardly walk on the grass. Still, I suppose if they went to law, they’d get nothing out of it after all the lawyers had been satisfied.”

Kit and Doris listened open-eyed.

“My goodness, Becky,” exclaimed Kit, “how on earth do you ever manage to keep track of all of them?”

“Keep track of them? Land, child, that ain’t anything after you’ve been to school with them and lived neighbors all your life. You children will like Sally and her brother, and maybe you can help put a little happiness into their lives, poor youngsters.”

“Oh, Mom, I love this place already,” whispered Jean contentedly, snuggling close to her mother’s side.

“Do you, dear?” Mrs. Craig smiled down into her eldest child’s face. For some reason she always waited for Jean’s judgment and opinion.

“Yes, I do, because it isn’t really a farm and still we can have a garden and sell the hay and get out wood and raise all we need for ourselves. I don’t think we can do much else the first year, can we, Becky?”

“If you do all that you’ll be getting along fine. I’m going to start you off chicken raising with a lot of little ones from my incubator. You can buy all you want for ten cents apiece, and if you get about fifteen last year pullets and a rooster, you’ve got your barnyard family all started.”

“Oh, I’d like to take care of the incubator chickens. May I, please?” begged Tommy instantly. “I think one of the saddest things in life is to be hatched without a mother.”

“Sympathetic Tommy,” laughed Kit, catching him down on the grass and rolling him over. “He’s going to adopt all the chickens and gosh knows what else.”

“I’m going to keep bees,” Doris announced dramatically, yet with a certain aloofness in her manner. “I want a garden and bees that bring me home the honey from the clover fields.”

“Lovely,” Jean exclaimed, hugging her knees, and rocking to and fro contentedly. “You always select such royal occupations, Doris. I shall be the middleman of the farm. I am going to find markets for all you raise. I’ll make the farm pay expenses. We’ll need a trailer to attach to the rear bumper of the car to hold the produce. I think we ought to go into the village soon and see about getting one. I want the place, don’t you Mother?”

“I think I shall love it,” said Mrs. Craig, lifting her face to the swaying pine boughs overhead. “I wish that I could stay here now and not have to go away at all.”

“We’d better get started,” said Becky. She rose from the porch step. “Ella Lou’s begun to get restless and that’s to let me know it’s almost noon. She can always tell the time when the sun gets high.”

“I feel sure Mom wants the place, don’t you, Jean?” Kit asked as they 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 that room overlooking the valley on the second floor. You can see the big 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, kids, it’s lonely for a woman like her, where Becky doesn’t mind it.”

“We’ll have to pitch in and make up to her for everything she’s left behind,” said Doris solemnly.

“Dear old Dorrie.” Kit put her arm around her sister and squeezed her affectionately.

“It’s all a question of system,” Jean thought aloud, her hands deep in the pockets of her gray flannel slacks. “We’ll have to make a business of living, and learn how to do things we hate to do with the least effort.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, you’re just a bluffer, Jean Craig,” exclaimed Doris suddenly, “just a bluffer. Anyone would think to hear you talk that you actually enjoyed going without things. Of course when we’re with Mother and Dad, or even Becky, 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 are you driving at?”

“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, Doris,” Jean said soothingly. “Only—”

“Don’t pat me,” retorted Doris, 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, besides, I really think I am. 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.

“Hey, kids, 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 simply breathtaking, but I mean, simply divine? Wish we could tame some, don’t you?”

They all agreed.

Tommy ran along the path ahead of them. “I like this ever so much better than the Cove,” he called. “It’s all so wild and free.”

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 ending in a snappy zip as the log broke.

As they neared Maple Grove, Jean exclaimed suddenly, “I just seem to have the feeling that we all belong here somehow! I know we’re going to love it.”

9. Fateful Moment

That very night a council was held of what Mr. Craig termed “the Board of Amateur Experts.”

“I think I need Matt in here for support,” he said laughingly from his favorite resting place, the old-fashioned, high-backed couch in the sitting room.

Maple Grove was a large, comfortable house. There was a front entrance, a side entrance and a well room at the back of the kitchen. There was a parlor and a front bedroom, a side bedroom 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 Becky ever used the Dutch oven nowadays except to store things away in. She had instead a fine modern electric stove over which she hovered like a sorceress from five A. M. to eleven A. M., producing such marvels of cookery that 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 butterscotch, 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 Grove than in all her life before.

“Well, there’s cooking and cooking, girls,” Rebecca 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 too, 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.”

It was that evening that the Board of Amateur Experts discussed everything that lay ahead of them from the said vegetables to chickens, cows, horses, and farm implements.

Mr. Craig had seemed relieved when he was sure that his wife approved of Woodhow. It was near Maple Grove and Rebecca, 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, a little 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,” Rebecca 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 a GI loan from the government,” Mrs. Craig demurred, “but we might try the three-year lease. What do you think, dear?”

“I should write tonight,” Mr. Craig told her confidently. “Even if I should gain my health completely, we could still stay up here summers, and you all would enjoy it, I know. Look at Tommy’s red cheeks, and Jean looks like another girl. If I keep on much longer on Becky’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 the youngsters escorted Mrs. Craig 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 Tommy began to whistle loudly.

“What’s his name, Mom?” asked Kit.

“Ralph McRae,” Jean answered for her mother.

“You know, really, Tommy,” protested Doris, “if you could just see how ridiculous you look on that fence rail, you’d come down.”

But Tommy ignored her and kept to the rail all the same, whistling. 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, Mom? And I found arbutus buds down in the pines too, and an old crow’s nest, and the crocuses are up.”

Mrs. Craig lifted her face to the blue sky with its great white clouds that drifted up from the south and sighed contentedly.

“There comes the mailman down the wildwood way,” Jean called from the curve of the road.

Already they had grown to watch for mail as the one real event of the day. Mr. Ricketts, the rural free delivery carrier, was a typical product of a small community, with 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 Craig 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 Becky 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. But Tom Ricketts knows better than to read my floral monthly without so much as by your leave. But I’ll renew it.”

“He must have read the postcard too,” said Doris.

“Read it?” Becky 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 Willetts could sit down singlehanded and write a history of the local inhabitants of this town just from memory and postcards, I don’t doubt a bit.”

The very next day the girls and Tommy went again to Woodhow. The keys were at Mr. Weaver’s, the next house down the road from Maple Grove. It was a rambling gray house sitting far back from the road and facing the western hills. Philip Weaver lived there alone. He was ninety-one and had had six wives, Rebecca 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 man working at a carpenter’s bench out in the woodshed. His hair was gray and curly and his upper lip clean-shaven. Tommy said he looked 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 Rebecca when she heard it. “Well, I must say, Kit, that is the best description 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 cutest old chest out in that side hall, Rebecca. 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 hope chest. Wasn’t that amusing?”

Armed with the key and waving goodbye 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. Back of this, opening out on a wide side porch, was the dining room. On the opposite side of the front hallway was a small room they could use for a study. Between it and the kitchen was a good-sized hallway lined with shelves and long handy drawers beneath them.

It was the kitchen and attic, though, that the girls lingered over most. The former extended across the entire back of the house and Doris said there was room enough to hold a dance in it.

“Where are you, Jeannie?” Kit called. “You’re missing thrills of discovery.”

But Jean was getting her own thrills. She had rolled up the legs of her blue jeans 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 moldy 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.”

Kit stood with her hands clasped behind her back, looking up at the tall tapering pines. They were splendid old trees, towering as high as the house 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 house, 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, kids, and turn a real golden harvest over to us by fall.”

10. New Home, New Friends

“Goods have come,” called Mr. Ricketts from the mailbox 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. Craig 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. Doris asked if she might keep the postage stamp for a memento.

“You read it, dear. I’d much rather you did,” their mother said, handing it over to Mr. Craig.

Rebecca 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, so there was just their own family together as they listened anxiously for the verdict. The letter ran:

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan,
April 4th