What does he mean by that?"

"I sent him a snap shot of the family."

"_Nancy_! What for?"

"So that he could see what we were like; so that he'd know we were fit
to be lifelong tenants!"

Mrs. Carey turned resignedly to the letter again.

From the dear mother who sits in the centre, to the lovable
little Peter who looks as if he were all that you describe
him! I was about his age when I went to the Yellow House to
spend a few years. Old Granny Hamilton had lived there all her
life, and when my mother, who was a widow, was seized with a
serious illness she took me home with her for a long visit.
She was never well enough to go away, so my early childhood
was passed in Beulah, and I only left the village when I was ten
years old, and an orphan.

"Oh, dear!" interpolated Nancy. "It seems, lately, as if nobody had both
father and mother!"

Granny Hamilton died soon after my mother, and I hardly know who
lived in the house for the next thirty years. It was my
brother's property, and a succession of families occupied it
until it fell to me in my turn. I have no happy memories
connected with it, so you can go ahead and make them for
yourselves. My only remembrance is of the west bedroom, where
my mother lived and died.

"The west bedroom; that isn't the painted one; no, of course it is the
one where I sleep," said Mrs. Carey. "The painted one must always have
been the guest chamber."

She could only move from bed to chair, and her greatest pleasure
was to sit by the sunset window and look at the daisies and
buttercups waving in that beautiful sloping stretch of field
with the pine woods beyond. After the grass was mown, and that
field was always left till the last for her sake, she used to
sit there and wait for Queen Anne's lace to come up; its tall
stems and delicate white wheels nodding among the grasses.

"Oh! I do _like_ him!" exclaimed Nancy impetuously. "Can't you _see_
him, mother? It's so nice of him to remember that they always mowed the
hayfield last for his mother's sake, and so nice of him to think of
Queen Anne's lace all these years!"

Now as to business, your Cousin Ann is quite right when she
tells you that you ought not to put expensive improvements on
another person's property lest you be disturbed in your
tenancy. That sort of cousin is always right, whatever she
says. Mine was no