We had a pleasant cottage there, with the miller's red-headed, freckled family for our only neighbors.

If our rooms were barer than they used to be, the sun shone in at all the windows; and as the leaves on the trees grew denser and darker, my mother grew stronger on her feet, and laughter returned to our house as the song bird to the grove.
We children had a very happy summer.

We had never lived in the country before, and we liked the change.

It was endless fun to explore the mill; to squeeze into forbidden places, and be pulled out by the angry miller; to tyrannize over the mill hands, and be worshipped by them in return; to go boating on the river, and discover unvisited nooks, and search the woods and fields for kitchen herbs, and get lost, and be found, a hundred times a week.

And what an adventure it was to walk the three versts into town, leaving a trail of perfume from the wild-flower posies we carried to our city friends! But these things did not last.