e, they eat
at one, and have long afternoons; and the schools keep twice a day.

We lived in the town--that is, Mr. and Mrs. Holabird did, and their
children, for such length of the time as their ages allowed--for
nineteen years; and then we moved to Westover, and this story began.

They called it "Westover," more or less, years and years before; when
there were no houses up the hill at all; only farm lands and pastures,
and a turnpike road running straight up one side and down the other,
in the sun. When anybody had need to climb over the crown, to get to
the fields on this side, they called it "going west over"; and so came
the name.

We always thought it was a pretty, sunsetty name; but it isn't
considered quite so fine to have a house here as to have it below the
brow. When you get up sufficiently high, in any sense, you begin to go
down again. Or is it that people can't be distinctively genteel, if
they get so far away from the common as no longer to well overlook it?

Grandfather Holabird--old Mr. Rufus,--I don't say whether he was my
grandfather or not, for it doesn't matter which Holabird tells this
story, or whether it is a Holabird at all--bought land here ever so
many years ago, and built a large, plain, roomy house; and here the
boys grew up,--Roderick and Rufus and Stephen and John.

Roderick went into the manufactory with his father,--who had himself
come up from being a workman to being owner,--and learned the
business, and made money, and married a Miss Bragdowne from C----, and
lived on at home. Rufus married and went away, and died when he was
yet a young man. His wife went home to her family, and there were no
little children. John lives in New York, and has two sons and three
daughters.

There are of us--Stephen Holabird's family--just six. Stephen and his
wife, Rosamond and Barbara and little Stephen and Ruth. Ruth is Mrs.
Holabird's niece, and Mr. Holabird's second cousin; for two cousins
married two sisters. She came here when she had neither father nor
mother left. They thought it queer up at the other house; because
"Stephen had never managed to have any too much for his own"; but of
course, being the wife's niece, they never thought of interfering, on
the mere claim of the common cousinship.

Ruth Holabird is a quiet little body, but she has her own particular
ways too.

There is one thing different in our house from most others. We are all
known by our straight names. I say _known_;