ey both
understood.

You may think the little girl's life was dull with lessons and sewing
and going to bed at dusk. But she found no end of fun. Now and then a
host of cousins came, and they climbed trees, ran races, waded in the
brooks, went off to the woods and swung in the wild grape-vines.
Sometimes they walked out on the end of a wide-spreading branch, holding
to the one above, and when they began to "teeter" too much they gave a
spring and came down on the soft ground. The little girl could go out a
long way because she was so light and fearless. They never broke their
necks or their limbs. They laughed and shouted and turned summersaults
and ran races. No day was ever long enough.

The school was a good mile away, but on very stormy days they were taken
in the covered wagon. They studied with a will, just as they played, and
you heard nothing about nerves in those days.

Some of the parents came that last day at school. Jim acquitted himself
creditably in his "Ode to Columbia," and the little girl recited with a
rose in her hand, though Margaret had quite a trouble to find one for
her. Roses didn't bloom all the year round as they do now. When the
children were dismissed they went out and gave some deafening hurrahs
for the two weeks' vacation. Oh, what throats and lungs they had!

When the little girl reached home she found a houseful of company. When
families have lived from one to two hundred years in one section of the
country, they get related to almost everybody. And though Aunt Becky
Odell was a second cousin of her mother's, she was aunt to the little
girl all the same. She had come up from West Farms to spend a few days
and brought her two little girls. Some other relatives had come from
Tarrytown.

The little girl greeted everybody, took off her Sunday white frock that
had a needleworked edge that her mother had worn twenty years and more
ago. Then she took the little girls out to see the chickens and hunt
some eggs and have a good play on the hay in the barn.

"Oh, ain't you just crazy to go to New York to live?" cried Polly Odell.
"The stores are so beautiful! When I go down I just don't want to come
back!"

"You was homesick at Aunt Ph[oe]be's, you know you was," said her
sister, with small regard for her tense.

"Well, I didn't like Aunt Ph[oe]be one bit. She's old and cross, and she
isn't our own aunt either. She won't let you stand by the window les'
you breathe on the glass, and she wo