n all day. In the autumn, when the nuts were
ripe, they would be scrambling over the roof, and in under the
eaves, to hide their stores in the garret, Miss Arabel told them.

"Why doesn't everbody have an old house, and let the squirrels in?"
cried Helena, in a rapture.

In ten days more,--the first week of June,--Dorris came.

Well,--"That let in all the rest," Helena said, and Desire, may be,
thought. "We shan't have it to ourselves any more."

The girls could all come down and call on Dorris Kincaid, and they
did.

But Desire and Helena had the first of it; nobody else went right up
into her room; nobody else helped her unpack and settle. And she was
so delighted with all that they had done for her.

The dais was large enough for two or three to sit upon at once, and
it was covered with green carpet of a small, mossy pattern, and the
window was open into the butternut on one side, and into the
honeysuckle on the other, and it was really a bower.

"I shall live ten hours in one," said Dorris.

"And you'll let me come and sleep with you some night, and hear the
bats," said Helena.

The Ledwiths made a good link; they had known the Kincaids so well;
if it had been only Dorris, alone, with her brother there, the
Westover girls might have been shy of coming often. Since Kenneth
had been at Miss Waite's, they had already grown a little less free
of the beautiful woods that they had just found out and begun fairly
to enjoy last autumn.

But the Ledwiths made a strong party; and they lived close by;
there were plans continually.

Since Leslie Goldthwaite and Barbara Holabird were married and gone,
and the Roger Marchbankses were burned out, and had been living in
the city and travelling, the Hobarts and the Haddens and Ruth and
Rosamond and Pen Pennington had kept less to their immediate
Westover neighborhood than ever; and had come down to Lucilla's, and
to Maddy Freeman's, and the Inglesides, as often as they had induced
them to go up to the Hill.

Maud Marchbanks and the Hendees were civil and neighborly enough at
home, but they did not care to "ramify." So it came to pass that
they were left a good deal to themselves. Olivia and Adelaide, when
they came up to Westover, to their uncle's, wondered "that papa
cared to build again; there really wasn't anything to come for; West
Hill was entirely changed."

So it was; and a very good thing.

I came across the other day, reading over Mr. Kingsley's "Two Year