ain to the little garden. But Miss Hester had gone in and shut the
door, and slowly, but in a state of rapture, the child went
on--hugging and caressing her flowers,--to what had been her home
since her mother, a year before, had been carried from their poor room
to the hospital, and never come back. She lived with a woman who added
a bit to her scanty earnings by taking the village cows on their
morning and evening journeys, and for this service she gave Maggie a
shelter and a share of the scanty food on her table.

When she went with the cows that evening, Maggie looked eagerly into
the little garden as she passed, but Miss Hester was not there. Maggie
could not see her, but she sat behind her blind looking out eagerly.
Could it be to see the child?

Maggie hesitated; she wanted to say "Thank you," yet she was half
afraid of the strange, silent woman. She waited a moment, hoping she
would come out, but all was still, and slowly and lingeringly at last
she went on.

In this odd way began a curious acquaintance between the lonely woman
and the still more friendless girl. Sometimes, if Miss Hester happened
to be in her garden when Maggie went by, she would half reluctantly
toss a flower over the fence, which Maggie always received with
delight, while still half afraid of the giver. But generally Hester,
with a strange feeling of shyness, managed to be in the house, where
strange to say, she hung around the window and seemed unable to settle
to anything, till the pale little thing had passed.

So it went on, till winter settled down grim and cold on that New
England village, and the cows went no more to the snow-covered
pasture, and Maggie--fixed up a bit as to clothes by some kind ladies
of the village--went every day to school.

As the weather grew colder, Miss Hester shut herself more and more
into her house, and so months passed and the strange acquaintance
progressed no farther.

One cold night, after everybody in the little village was snugly
tucked into bed, and every light was out, a wind came down from the
plains of the great Northwest, and brought with it millions and
billions of beautiful dancing flakes of snow, and proceeded to have a
grand frolic.

All night long the snow and the wind played around the houses and
through the streets, and in the morning when people began to get up
and look out, they hardly knew their own village. It seemed to be
turned into a strange range of white hills, with here an