g. Sylvia could
remember the very sound of Mother's clear voice as she corrected a
mistake. They were reading a story about what happened to a drop of
water that fell into the brook in their field; how, watering the
thirsty cornfields as it flowed, the brook ran down to the river
near La Chance, where it worked ever so many mills and factories and
things. Then on through bigger and bigger rivers until it reached
the Mississippi, where boats rode on its back; and so on down to the
ocean. And there, after resting a while, it was pumped up by the sun
and made into a cloud, and the wind blew it back over the land and
to their field again, where it fell into the brook and said, "Why,
how-de-do, Sylvia--you still here?"

Father had written the story, and Mother had copied it out on the
typewriter so it would be easy for Sylvia to read.

After they had finished she remembered looking out of the window and
watching the big white clouds drift across the pale bright April sky.
They were full of hundreds of drops of water, she thought, that were
going to fall into hundreds of other brooks, and then travel and work
till they reached the sea, and then rest for a while and begin all
over again. Her dark eyes grew very wide as she watched the endless
procession of white mountains move across the great arch of the sky.
Her imagination was stirred almost painfully, her mind expanding with
the effort to take in the new conception of size, of great numbers, of
the small place of her own brook, her own field in the hugeness of
the world. And yet it was an ordered hugeness full of comforting
similarity! Now, no matter where she might go, or what brooks she
might see, she would know that they were all of one family, that the
same things happened to them all, that every one ended in the ocean.
Something she had read on a piece of paper made her see the familiar
home field with the yellow water of the little creek, as a part of the
whole world. It was very strange. She tried to tell Mother something
of what was in her mind, but, though Mother listened in a sympathetic
silence, it was evident that she could make nothing out of the
incoherent account. Sylvia thought that she would try to tell Father,
the next chance she had. Even at seven, although she loved her mother
passionately and jealously, she was aware that her father's mind was
more like her own. He understood some things that Mother didn't,
although Mother was always, always right, a