Tell me how you spend your life." Phebe was sitting face to face with her, balancing the boat with the oars against the swift flowing of the river, with smiles coming and going on her face as rapidly as the shadows and the sunshine chasing each other over the fields this May morning.
"You know," she answered simply, "we live a mile away from the nearest house, and that is only a cottage where an old farm laborer lives with his wife.

It's very lonesome up there on the hills.

Days and days go by, and I never hear a voice speaking, and I feel as if I could not bear the sound of my own voice when I call the cattle home, or the fowls to come for their corn.

If it wasn't for the living things around me, that know me as well as they know one another, and love me more, I should feel sometimes as if I was dead.

And I long so to hear somebody speak--to be near more of my fellow-creatures.