e and long borders at each side of
the house, then a wide stretch of grass behind the garage, and beyond
that, back of the shrubs and the fruit trees and the thickly growing
vines, was the wall. It was higher than the boundaries at the sides
and front of Cousin Jasper's place, perhaps to afford a better surface
for the grapevines and pear trees trained against it, perhaps for
another reason.

Oliver walked along it slowly, looking up at the smooth bricks and
wondering how it was to be climbed. The more difficult it appeared the
more determined he became to get to the top. In the middle of the wall
behind a summerhouse stood a stout trellis, the support of an
exceedingly thorny rose vine. Here, he decided, was the place to
scramble up, but he must make haste, for people in the house would be
waking and would see him. Carefully he set a foot upon the lowest bar,
found that it would hold, and began mounting upward.

There were trees beyond the wall, not the trimmed, well-kept kind that
grew in Cousin Jasper's garden, but a scrubby growth of box elder and
silver-leaved poplar such as spring up in myriads where the grass is
never cut. Hanging over the top of the coping, he could peer through
their branches and see a house beyond. He was astonished to see the
shingled roof rising so close by, for he had not thought that they had
neighbors who dwelt so near.

The house was a square one of yellow stone, with overhanging eaves and
small windows and an old-fashioned stoop in front, over which the roof
came down in a long sweep. It must have been built a hundred years
ago, he thought, and it might have seemed a charming, comfortable old
place were it not so unutterably dejected and dingy. Its windows were
cracked, the grass grew tall and ragged upon its lawns, a litter of
rubbish lay about the back door, and the woodwork, that should have
been white, was gray from want of paint.

"It looks as though the people who lived in it just--didn't care,"
Oliver commented. "It is a nice old house, but it seems worn out and
discouraged, somehow, like John Massey's cottage. I wonder who owns
it."

An open space between the dwelling and the wall had apparently once
been a broad lawn, then had been plowed up for the planting of a patch
of grain, and had at last been left as a neglected waste for weeds and
brambles to flourish undisturbed. An old scarecrow still stood
knee-deep in the tangled green, left there after the field had been
aba