tle stick at each end marked how far the
planted rows extended.

Lois gathered up her tools then, to go in, but instead of going in she
sat down on one of the wooden seats that were fixed under the great
apple trees. She was tired and satisfied; and in that mood of mind and
body one is easily tempted to musing. Aimlessly, carelessly, thoughts
roved and carried her she knew not whither. She began to draw
contrasts. Her home life, the sweets of which she was just tasting, set
off her life at Mrs. Wishart's with its strange difference of flavour;
hardly the brown earth of her garden was more different from the
brilliant--coloured Smyrna carpets upon which her feet had moved in
some people's houses. Life there and life here,--how diverse from one
another! Could both be life? Suddenly it occurred to Lois that her
garden fence shut in a very small world, and a world in which there was
no room for many things that had seemed to her delightful and desirable
in these weeks that were just passed. Life must be narrow within these
borders. She had had several times in New York a sort of perception of
this, and here it grew defined. Knowledge, education, the intercourse
of polished society, the smooth ease and refinement of well-ordered
households, and the habits of affluence, and the gratification of
cultivated tastes; more yet, the _having_ cultivated tastes; the
gratification of them seemed to Lois a less matter. A large horizon, a
wide experience of men and things; was it not better, did it not make
life richer, did it not elevate the human creature to something of more
power and worth, than a very narrow and confined sphere, with its
consequent narrow and confined way of looking at things? Lois was just
tired enough to let all these thoughts pass over her, like gentle waves
of an incoming tide, and they were emphazised here and there by a
vision of a brown curly head, and a kindly, handsome, human face
looking into hers. It was a vision that came and went, floated in and
disappeared among the waves of thought that rose and fell. Was it not
better to sit and talk even with Mr. Dillwyn, than to dig and plant
peas? Was not the Lois who did _that_, a quite superior creature to the
Lois who did _this?_ Any common, coarse man could plant peas, and do it
as well as she; was this to be her work, this and the like, for the
rest of her life? Just the labour for material existence, instead of
the refining and forming and up-building of th