nter, but one Sunday as she sat in the big pew, not daring to
swing her feet, they grew more and more numb until at last, when she
was obliged to stand on them, she fell over--her poor little feet were
frozen, and she had to be carried home and thawed out!

When she was eight years old her father left his hill farm and moved
down to the Learned house, a much bigger farm of three hundred acres,
with the brook-like French river winding through its broad meadows,
and three great barns standing in the lowlands between the hill and
the house. Stephen and David remained on the hill to work their small
farms there, and the other sisters stayed there, but Clara was not
lonesome in the new home in the valley, for at that time she had as
playmates the four children of Captain Barton's nephew, who had
recently died. With them Clara played hide-and-seek in the big
hay-mows, and other interesting games. Her most marked characteristic
then and for many years afterward was her excessive shyness, yet when
there was anything to do which did not include conversation she was
always the champion. At times she was so bashful that even speaking to
an intimate friend was often an agony to her, and it is said she once
stayed home from meeting on Sunday rather than tell her mother that
her gloves were too worn out to wear!

Inside the new house she found many fascinating things to do, and did
them with eager interest. The house was being redecorated, and Clara
went from room to room, watching the workmen, and even learned to
grind and mix paints. Then she turned her attention to the paperers,
who were so much amused with the child's cleverness that they showed
her how to match, trim and hang paper, and in every room they
good-naturedly let her paste up some piece of the decoration, so she
felt that the house was truly hers, and never lost her affection for
it in any of her later wanderings or changes of residence.

When the new home was completed inside Clara turned her attention to
out-of-door matters and found more than one opportunity for daring
feats. With shining eyes and bated breath, she learned to cross the
little winding French river on teetering logs at its most dangerous
depths. When this grew tame, she would go to the sawmill and ride out
on the saw carriage twenty feet above the stream, and be pulled back
on the returning log, and oh the joy of such dangerous sport!

By the time she was eleven years old her brothers had been so