came one morning, very early. A cow in an adjoining field was making
an unusual sound. Elizabeth looked out and beckoned me to the window.
There they were, at last! two reddish-tan, shy creatures--a doe and a
half-grown fawn--stepping mincingly down to the brook to drink. We could
have hugged ourselves with the delight of it--deer--wild deer--on our
own farm, drinking from our own brook, here in this old, old land!

I wonder if they heard us, or perhaps sensed us. Or they may not have
liked the noise of greeting, or protest, made by the neighbor's cow.
Whatever the reason, they suddenly threw up their heads, seemed to look
straight at us, turned lightly, and simply floated away. What I mean by
that is that their movement was not like that of any other animal, or
like a bird's--it suggested thistledown. They drifted over the stone
wall and clumps of bushes without haste and seemingly without weight. It
was as if we had seen phantoms of the dawn.

We saw them often, after that. Sometimes at evening they grazed in our
lower meadow. Once, three of them in full daylight crossed the upland
just above the house. They were not fifty yards away, moving
deliberately, looking neither to the right nor to the left.

We felt the honor of it--they had admitted us to their charmed circle.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER FIVE

I

_But Sarah was biding her time_

[Illustration]

I have not mentioned, I think, a small building that, when we came,
stood just across the road from our house--a rather long, low structure
with sliding windows, called "the shop." Red raspberries of a large,
sweet variety were ripening about it, and within was a short box
counter, a shoemaker's work-bench, a cutting-board, a great bag of
wooden shoe-pegs, and a quantity of leather scraps, for it had, in fact,
been a shop during the two generations preceding our ownership. Before
that it appeared to have served as a sort of office for Captain Ben
Meeker, who also had been not merely a farmer, as certain records
proved. Captain Ben may have built the shop, though I think it was
older, for when we examined the picturesque little building, with a view
to restoration, it proved to be too far gone--too much a structure of
decay. So we tore down "the shop," and, incidentally, Old Pop, who did
the tearing, found a Revolutionary bayonet in the loft; also a more
recent, and particularly hot, hornets' nest which caused him to leap
through the window and spring