adside, only shut off by its own garden-wall
and a high gate, which it was comfortable to lock of winter evenings.
There were two small rooms in it beside the kitchen and the dairy, and
a loft reached by a ladder, wherein to store many a sack of potatoes,
or wood for the winter firing. The kitchen was very pleasant, with its
two square windows full of geraniums in bloom, the pictures of saints
on its white-washed walls, the chimney-piece with its china
shepherdesses and dogs, and the dresser with a very fine show of
crockery. There was always a sweet smell of cream there from the
dairy, which opened on one side. The two rooms went off each side of
the fire-place. The walls were cleanly white-washed, the tiled floor
ochred; altogether it was a charming little house for love to build a
home in.

Little Katie, precious as she was, roamed at her own sweet will. No
harm could come to her in the fields where she strayed. She was
home-keeping, and never went far from her own doorstep; nor need she
for variety. On one side of the field there was a violet bank, mossy,
and hung over with thorn trees. Under the thorns it was possible to
hide as within a greenhouse, and children love such make-believe. On
the other side of the bank was a steep descent to a tiny stream
prattling over shining stones; and fox-gloves grew in the water with
the meadow orchis, and many other water-loving flowers. That field was
a meadow every year, and once hidden between the hedge and the
meadow-grasses a child was invisible to all but the bright-eyed birds,
who themselves have a taste for such mysteries, and the corn-crake,
which one thinks of as only half bird, that scuttled on Katie's
approach down one of a million aisles of seeding brown grasses.

Then on the other side of the field there was a deep, dry ditch under
great curtains of blackberry bushes, which in autumn bore luscious
fruit. And by Katie's door, if she would sit in the sun, was a
primrose bank, about which the hens stalked and clucked with their
long-legged chickens or much prettier ducklings. Katie did not want
for playmates. She had none of her own kind, but was sociable to the
fowl and the pig in his stye, and the white and red cattle that
browsed in the pastures. She held long colloquies with the creatures
all day, and if it rained would fetch her stool into an out-house
which the hens frequented.

But her grand playmate, the confidant and abettor of all her games,
was a placid