bold
look, intended for a frank one.

Grandfather looked at him earnestly; but nothing more was said. We all
felt uneasy. Dinner ended rather drearily.

In the evening Theodora read to us several chapters from _Dred_, Mrs.
Stowe's novel. Anti-slavery books were then well nigh sacred at the old
farm. Almost any other work of fiction would hardly have been considered
fit reading for Sunday.

CHAPTER III

MONDAY AT THE OLD FARM

"I shall expect you to work with us on the farm, 'Edmund,'" grandfather
said to me after breakfast. "But you may have this forenoon, to look
about and see the place. Enjoy yourself all you can."

The robins were singing blithely in the orchard. I went thither and I
think it was four robins' nests which I found in as many different apple
trees, one with three, two with four and one with five blue eggs. Is
there anything prettier than the eggs of a robin, in the eyes of a boy?

As I climbed the orchard wall to cross the road, a milk snake was
sunning on the loose stones among the raspberry bushes, the first I had
ever seen; and I bear witness that the ancestral antipathy to the
serpent leaped within me instantly. I beat his head without remorse, ay,
pounded his tail, too, which wriggled prodigiously, and chopped his body
to pieces with sharp stones.

This sorry victory achieved, I set off across the fields to the west
pasture and thence descended to the west brook, where I saw several
trout in a deep hole beneath the decayed logs of a former bridge. With a
mental resolve to come here fishing, as soon as I could procure a hook
and line, I continued onward through a low, swampy tract overgrown with
black alder and at length reached the "colt pasture," upon a cleared
hill. Here a handsome black colt, along with a sorrel and a white one,
was feeding, and at once came racing to meet me, in the hope of a nib
of provender, or salt. Continuing my voyage of discovery, I came to a
tract of woodland beyond the pasture through which a cart road led to a
clearing where there was a small old house, deserted, and also a small
barn. This, as I had yet to learn, was the "Aunt Hannah lot," an
appendage of the farm, which had come into grandfather's possession from
a sister, my great-aunt of that name. Save a field of oats, the land
here was allowed to lie in grass and remain otherwise uncultivated.
Beyond this small outlying farm, there was a dense body of woodland,
which I did not then attempt to pe