lants just set there from the conservatory; opposite stood a white,
low bed in a curtained alcove, and beyond was a dressing-closet.
Laura thought she should not be able to sleep there at all for a
night or two, for the beauty of it and the good time she should be
having.

At that same moment Frank and her Aunt Oldways were getting down
from the stage that had brought them over from Ipsley, where they
slept after their day's journey from Boston,--at the doorstone of
the low, broad-roofed, wide-built, roomy old farm-house in
Homesworth.

Right in the edge of the town it stood, its fields stretching over
the south slope of green hills in sunny uplands, and down in meadowy
richness to the wild, hidden, sequestered river-side, where the
brown water ran through a narrow, rocky valley,--Swift River they
called it. There are a great many Swift Rivers in New England. It
was only a vehement little tributary of a larger stream, beside
which lay larger towns; it was doing no work for the world,
apparently, at present; there were no mills, except a little
grist-mill to which the farmers brought their corn, cuddled among
the rocks and wild birches and alders, at a turn where the road came
down, and half a dozen planks made a bit of a bridge.

"O, what beautiful places!" cried Frank, as they crossed the little
bridge, and glanced either way into a green, gray, silvery vista of
shrubs and rocks, and rushing water, with the white spires of
meadow-sweet and the pink hardback, and the first bright plumes of
the golden rod nodding and shining against the shade,--as they
passed the head of a narrow, grassy lane, trod by cows' feet, and
smelling of their milky breaths, and the sweetness of hay-barns,--as
they came up, at length, over the long slope of turf that carpeted
the way, as for a bride's feet, from the roadside to the very
threshold. She looked along the low, treble-piled garden wall, too,
and out to the open sheds, deep with pine chips; and upon the broad
brown house-roof, with its long, gradual decline, till its eaves
were within reach of a child's fingers from the ground; and her
quick eye took in facilities.

"O, if Laura could see this! After the old shed-top in Brier Street,
and the one tree!"

But Laura had got what the shed-top stood for with her; it was
Frank who had hearkened to whole forests in the stir of the one
brick-rooted fir. To that which each child had, it was already
given.

In a week or two Frank wrote