, with emphasis, and a kindly smile. "If
anything happens, come to me. Meanwhile,--you may talk, if you like,
to Aunt Euphrasia. I'll trust her."

And so the Lord set this angel of his to watch over this thread of
our story.

We may leave it here for a while.

CHAPTER VII.

BEL AND BARTHOLOMEW.

"Kroo! kroo! I've cramp in my legs,
Sitting so long atop of my eggs!
Never a minute for rest to snatch;
I wonder when they are going to hatch!

"Cluck! cluck! listen! tseep!
Down in the nest there's a stir and a peep.
Everything comes to its luck some day;
I've got chickens! What will folks say?"

Bel Bree made that rhyme. It came into her head suddenly one
morning, sitting in her little bedroom window that looked right
over the grass yard into the open barn-door, where the hens
stalked in and out; and one, with three chickens, was at that
minute airing herself and her family that had just come out of
their shells into the world, and walked about already as if the
great big world was only there, just as they had of course
expected it to be. The hen was the most astonished. _She_ was just
old enough to begin to be able to be astonished. Her whole mind
expressed itself in that proud cluck, and pert, excited carriage.
She had done a wonderful thing, and she didn't know how she had
done it. Bel "read it like coarse print,"--as her step-mother was
wont to say of her own perspicacities,--and put it into jingle, as
she had a trick of doing with things.

Bel Bree lived in New Hampshire; fifteen miles from a railway; in
the curious region where the old times and the new touch each
other and mix up; where the women use towels, and table-cloths, and
bed-spreads, of their mothers' own hand-weaving, and hem their new
ones with sewing-machines brought by travelling agents to their
doors; where the men mow and rake their fields with modern
inventions, but only get their newspapers once a week; where the
"help" are neighbors' girls, who wear overskirts and high hats, and
sit at the table with the family; where there are rag carpets and
"painted chamber-sets;" where they feed calves and young turkeys,
and string apples to dry in the summer, and make wonderful patchwork
quilts, and wax flowers, and worsted work, perhaps, in the long
winters; where they go to church and to sewing societies from miles
about, over tremendous hills and pitches,