istant hills than at any other point. The business
character of this street mingled oddly in summer with the rural life
around it. At several right-angles, green and mossy lanes, arched by
venerable elms, seemed to be offering their crooked elbows to lead it
back to the simple pastoral life from which it sprang.

Bordering these sequestered paths, which were dignified by the title of
streets, were cottages surrounded by small inclosures, whose proprietors
cultivated vegetables, hens, pigs, and cows,--these last being, quite
unconsciously, the true surveyors of Warren; for, in direct obedience to
pathways they had worn when traversing the fields to and from their
homes, chewing the quiet cud of meditation, had the buildings been
erected. Outside these lanes, again, were the larger land-owners, whose
farms formed the outer circle of our life.

Annie Bray was fond of penetrating beyond these various circles of
social existence, and wandering far off to the woods and hills, whose
ring of emerald, studded now and then with the turquoise of some
forest-lake, inclosed us as in a basin.

As I entered the kitchen of the cottage, Mrs. Bray, a stout woman of
forty, the oracle of her sex in the village as to matters of domestic
economy and dress,--which last was of a more costly and varied material
than the others could afford, abounding in many-colored prints, and a
stuff gown for Sunday wear,--made her appearance, her apron covered with
flour, an incrustation of dough on each particular finger, which it
always destroyed my appetite to see.

"Well, Sandy, I'm glad you've come. You've jest sp'iled Sary Ann. There
she sets a-nid-nid-noddin' on that stool, and won't stir to bed till she
sees Sandy."

There, by the stove, sat the blacksmith's blue-eyed daughter, a proof
that God sometimes interferes with hereditary botch-work, and makes a
child fresh and fair, letting her, like a delicate flower in noisome
marsh or stagnant water, draw pure, nourishing juices out of elements
poisonous to anything less impregnated with Himself.

To be sure, through ignorance of the nature of the child intrusted to
them, the blacksmith and his wife blundered with her tender soul and
beautiful body. One of their most heinous crimes against her, in my
estimation, had been in the bestowal of the name of Sary Ann,--a filial
compliment paid by Mrs. Bray to the mother who bore her. Then they
dressed her in the brightest of red or orange, so that Nature,