Lowell, and she was willing and glad, knowing all about the place, to
make it our home.

The change involved a great deal of work. "Boarders" signified a large
house, many beds, and an indefinite number of people. Such piles of
sewing accumulated before us! A sewing-bee, volunteered by the
neighbors, reduced the quantity a little, and our child-fingers had to
take their part. But the seams of those sheets did look to me as if
they were miles long!

My sister Lida and I had our "stint,"--so much to do every day. It was
warm weather, and that made it the more tedious, for we wanted to be
running about the fields we were so soon to leave. One day, in sheer
desperation, we dragged a sheet up with us into an apple-tree in the
yard, and sat and sewed there through the summer afternoon, beguiling
the irksomeness of our task by telling stories and guessing riddles.

It was hardest for me to leave the garret and the garden. In the old
houses the garret was the children's castle. The rough rafters,--it was
always ail unfinished room, otherwise not a true garret,--the music of
the rain on the roof, the worn sea-chests with their miscellaneous
treasures, the blue-roofed cradle that had sheltered ten blue-eyed
babies, the tape-looms and reels and spinning wheels, the herby smells,
and the delightful dream corners,--these could not be taken with us to
the new home. Wonderful people had looked out upon us from under those
garret-eaves. Sindbad the Sailor and Baron Munchausen had sometimes
strayed in and told us their unbelievable stories; and we had there
made acquaintance with the great Caliph Haroun Alraschid.

To go away from the little garden was almost as bad. Its lilacs and
peonies were beautiful to me, and in a corner of it was one tiny square
of earth that I called my own, where I was at liberty to pull up my
pinks and lady's delights every day, to see whether they had taken
root, and where I could give my lazy morning-glory seeds a poke,
morning after morning, to help them get up and begin their climb. Oh, I
should miss the garden very much indeed!

It did not take long to turn over the new leaf of our home experience.
One sunny day three of us children, my youngest sister, my brother
John, and I, took with my mother the first stage-coach journey of our
lives, across Lynnfield plains and over Andover hills to the banks of
the Merrimack. We were set down before an empty house in a yet
unfinished brick block, where we wat