the first story, and a vine climbs up the front, and spreads its leafy
branches from side to side.

If you will only go up these steps you will see at the end of the narrow
entry the kitchen, with its dresser and its pewter plates and dishes, its
soup-tureens puffing out like balloons; open the door to the right and
you are in the parlour with its dark oak furniture, a ceiling crossed by
brown smoke-stained rafters, and its old Nuremberg clock click-clacking
monotonously.

Here sits a woman of five-and-thirty, spinning and dreaming, her waist
encircled with a long black taffety bodice, and her head covered with a
velvet headdress, with long ribbons.

A man in broad-skirted velveteen coat, with breeches of the same, and
with a fine open brow, looking calm and thoughtful, is dandling on his
knee a fine stout boy, whistling the call to "boot and saddle."

There lies the quiet village at the end of the valley, framed, as you
sit, in the little cottage window; the river is leaping over the mill-dam
and crossing the winding street; the old houses, with their deep and
gloomy eaves, their barns, their gabled windows, their nets drying in the
sun; the young girls, kneeling by the river-side on the stones, washing
linen; the cattle lazily lounging down to drink, and gravely lowing
amidst the willows; the young herdsmen cracking their whips; the mountain
summit, jagged like a saw by the pointed fir-tree tops--all these rural
objects lie reflected in the flowing blue stream, only broken by the
fleets of ducks sailing down or the occasional passage of an old tree
rooted up on the mountain-side.