favourite wild flowers, blue-eyed Marys. They had dainty stems
from six to eight inches high and delicate heads of bloom made up
of little flowers, two petals up, blue, two turning down, white.
Perhaps you don't know about anything prettier than that. There
were maiden-hair ferns among them too! and the biggest lichens
you ever saw on the fence, while in the hollow of a rotten rail a
little chippy bird always built a hair nest. She got the hairs
at our barn, for most of them were gray from our carriage horses,
Ned and Jo. All down that side of the orchard the fence corners
were filled with long grass and wild flowers, a few alder bushes
left to furnish berries for the birds, and wild roses for us, to
keep their beauty impressed on us, father said.

The east end ran along the brow of a hill so steep we coasted
down it on the big meat board all winter. The board was six
inches thick, two and a half feet wide, and six long. Father
said slipping over ice and snow gave it the good scouring it
needed, and it was thick enough to last all our lives, so we
might play with it as we pleased. At least seven of us could go
skimming down that hill and halfway across the meadow on it. In
the very place we slid across, in summer lay the cowslip bed.
The world is full of beautiful spots, but I doubt if any of them
ever were prettier than that. Father called it swale. We didn't
sink deep, but all summer there was water standing there. The
grass was long and very sweet, there were ferns and a few calamus
flowers, and there must have been an acre of cowslips--cowslips
with big-veined, heartshaped, green leaves, and large pale gold
flowers. I used to sit on the top rail of that orchard fence and
look down at them, and try to figure out what God was thinking
when He created them, and I wished that I might have been where I