ither of them had been able to get to the
village; besides which, she knew that papa felt very poor indeed, and
she did not like to ask for money, even so little as would have
carried out her wish. "This must do," she said, with a quick sigh.
Then she hung up her own stocking, and went upstairs. Eyebright always
had hung up her stocking on Christmas Eve ever since she could
remember, and she did it now more from the force of habit than any
thing else, forgetting that there was no Wealthy at hand to put things
in, and that they were living on an island which, since winter began,
seemed to have changed its place, and swung a great deal farther away
from things and people and the rest of the world than it had been.

For winter comes early to the Maine coasts. Long before Thanksgiving,
the ground was white with snow, and it stayed white from that time on
till spring. After the first heavy storm, the farmers turned out with
snow-ploughs to break paths through the village. As more snow fell, it
was shovelled out and thrown on either side of the path, till the long
double mounds half hid the people who walked between. But there was no
one to break a path along the shore toward the causeway. The tide,
rising and falling, kept a little strip of sand clear for part of the
distance, and on this Eyebright now and then made her way to the
village. But it was a hard and uncertain walk, and as rowing the boat
was very cold work, it happened sometimes that for weeks together
neither she nor papa left the island, or saw anybody except each
other.

This would have seemed very lonely, indeed, had not the house-work
filled up so much of her time. Papa had no such resource. After the
wood was chopped, and the cow fed, and a little snow shovelled,
perhaps,--that was all. He could not find pleasure, as Eyebright did,
in reading over and over again a book which he already knew by heart;
the climate did not brace and stimulate him as it did her; the cold
affected him very much; he moped in the solitude, and time hung
heavily upon his hands.

Eyebright often wondered how they could ever have got along--or, in
fact, if it could have been possible to get along at all--without
their cow. Papa had bought her in the autumn, when he began to realize
how completely they were to be shut off from village supplies in bad
weather. She was a good-natured, yellow beast, without any pedigree,
or any name till Eyebright dubbed her "Golden Rod," partly becau