t were at
once drawn in its direction by an irresistible force, and presently we
found ourselves standing at the lower end of the ridge and looking up
the slope!

"I wish we had a picture of it as it must have been before the land was
cleared,--it would be a great help in replanting," I said; "it needs
something dense and bold for a background to the rocks."

"The skeleton of the old barn on the other side spoils it; it ought to
come down," was Bart's rejoinder. "It seems as if everything we wish to
do hinges on some other thing."

This barn had been set back against the knoll so that from the house the
hayloft window seemed like a part of a low shed. Certainly our forbears
knew the ways of the New England wind very thoroughly, judging by the
way they huddled their houses and outbuildings in hollows or under
hillsides to avoid its stress. And when they couldn't do that, they
turned sloping, humpbacked roofs toward the northeast to shed the snow
and tempt the wind in its wild moods to play leapfrog and thus pass
over.

Such a roof as this has the house at the next farm, and judging by the
location of the old hay barn, and the lay of the road, it must have once
belonged to this adjoining property rather than to ours.

Slowly we circled the knoll, dropped into the hollow, and stood upon the
uneven floor of wide chestnut planks that was to be our camp. Other
lodgers had this barn besides ourselves and, unlike ourselves,
hereditary tenants. Swallows of steel-blue wings hung their nests in a
whispering colony against the beams, a pair of gray squirrels arched
their tails at us and chattering whisked up aloft, where they evidently
have a family in the dilapidated pigeon cote, while among some
cornstalks and other litter in the low earth cellar beneath we could
hear the rustling doubtless born of the swift little feet of mice. (Yes,
I know that it is a feminine quality lacking in me, but I have never yet
been able to conjure up any species of fear in connection with these
playful little rodents.)

The cots, table, chairs, and screens were as I had placed them several
days ago; but it was not the interior that held us but the view looking
eastward across the sunlit meadows. In fact this side of the barn had
the wide openings of an observatory. The gnarled apple trees of the
orchard still bore pink-and-white wreaths on the shady side, and the
purling of bluebirds blended with the voice of the river that ran
between the hi