our
side of the ridge.

The air was different here, it was full of hill and pasture.

There were not many trees immediately about the spot where we were to
be; but a great group of ashes and walnuts stood a little way down
against the roadside, and all around in the far margins of the fields
were beautiful elms, and round maples that would be globes of fire in
autumn days, and above was the high blue glory of the unobstructed
sky.

The ground fell off suddenly into a great hill-dimple, just where the
walls were laid; that was why Grandfather Holabird had chosen the
spot. There could be a cellar-kitchen; and it had been needful for the
moving, that all the rambling, outrunning L, which had held the
kitchens and woodsheds before, should be cut off and disposed of as
mere lumber. It was only the main building--L-shaped still, of three
very large rooms below and five by more subdivision above--which had
majestically taken up its line of march, like the star of empire,
westward. All else that was needful must be rebuilt.

Mother did not like a cellar-kitchen. It would be inconvenient with
one servant. But Grandfather Holabird had planned the house before he
offered it to us to live in. What we were going to save in rent we
must take out cheerfully in extra steps.

It was in the bright, lengthening days of April, when the bluebirds
came fluttering out of fairy-land, that the old house finally stopped,
and stood staring around it with its many eyes,--wide open to the
daylight, all its green winkers having been taken off,--to see where
it was and was likely to be for the rest of its days. It had a very
knowing look, we thought, like a house that had seen the world.

The sun walked round it graciously, if not inquisitively. He flashed
in at the wide parlor windows and the rooms overhead, as soon as he
got his brow above the hill-top. Then he seemed to sidle round
southward, not slanting wholly out his morning cheeriness until the
noonday glory slanted in. At the same time he began with the
sitting-room opposite, through the one window behind; and then through
the long, glowing afternoon, the whole bright west let him in along
the full length of the house, till he just turned the last corner, and
peeped in, on the longest summer days, at the very front. This was
what he had got so far as to do by the time we moved in,--as if he
stretched his very neck to find out the last there was to learn about
it, and whether nowhere i