it at
first sight, and loved it better and better all the time that she stayed
at St. Helen's. "Dr. Hope and Mount Cheyenne were our first friends in the
place," she used to say in after-days.

"How nice it is to be by ourselves!" said Phil, as he lay comfortably on
the sofa watching Clover unpack. "I get so tired of being all the time
with people. Dear me! the room looks quite homelike already."

Clover had spread a pretty towel over the bare table, laid some books and
her writing-case upon it, and was now pinning up a photograph over the
mantel-piece.

"We'll make it nice by-and-by," she said cheerfully; "and now that I've
tidied up a little, I think I'll go and see what has become of Mrs.
Watson. She'll think I have quite forgotten her. You'll lie quiet and rest
till dinner, won't you?"

"Yes," said Phil, who looked very sleepy; "I'm all right for an hour to
come. Don't hurry back if the ancient female wants you."

Clover spread a shawl over him before she went and shut one of the
windows.

[Illustration: "Clover spread a shawl over him before she left, and shut
one of the windows."]

"We won't have you catching cold the very first morning," she said. "That
would be a bad story to send back to papa."

She found Mrs. Watson in very low spirits about her room.

"It's not that it's small," she said. "I don't need a very big room; but I
don't like being poked away at the back so. I've always had a front room
all my life. And at Ellen's in the summer, I have a corner chamber, and
see the sea and everything--It's an elegant room, solid black walnut with
marble tops, and--Lighthouses too; I have three of them in view, and they
are really company for me on dark nights. I don't want to be fussy, but
really to look out on nothing but a side yard with some trees--and they
aren't elms or anything that I'm used to, but a new kind. There's a thing
out there, too, that I never saw before, which looks like one of the giant
ants' nests of Africa in 'Morse's Geography' that I used to read about
when I was--It makes me really nervous."

Clover went to the window to look at the mysterious object. It was a
cone-shaped thing of white unburned clay, whose use she could not guess.
She found later that it was a receptacle for ashes.

"I suppose _your_ rooms are front ones?" went on Mrs. Watson, querulously.

"Mine isn't. It's quite a little one at the side. I think it must be just
under this. Phil's is in front, and is a ni