n winter as well as in summer. If you go into
the woods in winter, you will find that almost all the trees have
dropped their pretty green leaves upon the ground, and are standing
cold and naked in the winter wind; but the pines and the firs keep on
their warm green clothes all the year round.

It was many years ago, before Jeannette was born, that her father
came to the mountains with his sharp axe and cut down some of the
fir-trees. Other men helped him, and they cut the great trees into
strong logs and boards, and built of them the house of which I have
told you. Now he will have a good home of his own for as long as he
likes to live there, and to it will come his wife and children as God
shall send them, to nestle among the hills.

Then he went down to the little town at the foot of the mountain, and
when he came back, he was leading a brown, long-eared donkey, and upon
that donkey sat a rosy-cheeked young woman, with smiling brown eyes,
and long braids of brown hair hanging below a little green hat set on
one side of her head, while beautiful rose-colored carnations peeped
from beneath it on the other side. Who was this? It wasn't Jeannette:
you know I told you this was before she was born. Can you guess, or
must I tell you that it was the little girl's mother? She had come up
the mountain for the first time to her new home,--the house built of
the fir and the pine,--where after awhile were born Jeannette's two
tall brothers, and at last Jeannette herself.

It was a good place to be born in. When she was a baby she used to lie
on the short, sweet grass before the doorstep, and watch the cows
and the goats feeding, and clap her little hands to see how rosy the
sunset made the snow that shone on the tops of those high peaks. And
the next summer, when she could run alone, she picked the blue-eyed
gentians, thrusting her small fingers between their fringed eyelids,
and begging them to open and look at little Jean; and she stained her
wee hands among the strawberries, and pricked them with the thorns
of the long raspberry-vines, when she went with her mother in the
afternoon to pick the sweet fruit for supper. Ah, she was a happy
little thing! Many a fall she got over the stones or among the brown
moss, and many a time the clean frock that she wore was dyed red with
the crushed berries; but, oh, how pleasant it was to find them in
great patches on the mountain-side, where the kind sun had warmed them
into such delici