Sometimes Mona would be of the party, and nothing pleased Agnes or her better than such wonderful things as these; while Willie found it very amusing to hear Agnes, who was sharp enough to pick up not a few of the chemical names, dropping the big words from her lips as if she were on the most familiar terms with the things they signified--_phosphuretted hydrogen, metaphosphoric acid, sesquiferrocyanide of iron_, and such like.
Then he would give an hour to preparation for the studies of next term; after which, until their early dinner, he would work at his bench or turning-lathe, generally at something for his mother or grandmother; or he would do a little mason-work amongst the ruins, patching and strengthening, or even buttressing, where he thought there was most danger of further fall--for he had resolved that, if he could help it, not another stone should come to the ground.
In this, his first summer at home from college, he also fitted up a small forge--in a part of the ruins where there was a wide chimney, whose vent ran up a long way unbroken.

Here he constructed a pair of great bellows, and set up an old anvil, which he bought for a trifle from Mr Willett; and here his father actually trusted him to shoe his horses; nor did he ever find a nail of Willie's driving require to be drawn before the shoe had to give place to a new one.
In the afternoon, he always read history, or tales, or poetry; and in the evening did whatever he felt inclined to do--which brings me to what occupied him the last hours of the daylight, for a good part of this first summer.
One lovely evening in June, he came upon Agnes, who was now eight years old, lying under the largest elm of a clump of great elms and Scotch firs at the bottom of the garden.

They were the highest trees in all the neighbourhood, and his father was very fond of them.

To look up into those elms in the summer time your eyes seemed to lose their way in a mist of leaves; whereas the firs had only great, bony, bare, gaunt arms, with a tuft of bristles here and there.

But when a ray of the setting sun alighted upon one of these firs it shone like a flamingo.