"I haven't got any kind of a mother," Elizabeth said, with
complacent melancholy.

"Stop fighting," Blair commanded amiably; "David is right; we
have a pigsty of a dining-room at our house." He paused to bend
over and touch with an ecstatic finger a flake of lichen covering
with its serpent green the damp, black bark in the crotch of the
old tree. "Isn't that pretty?" he said.

"You ought not to say things about our house," Nannie reproved
him. As Blair used to say when he grew up, "Nannie was born
proper."

"Why not?" said Blair. "They know everything is ugly at our
house. They've got real dining-rooms at their houses; they don't
have old desks round, the way we do."

It was in the late sixties that these children played in the
apple-tree and arranged their conjugal future; at that time the
Maitland house was indeed, as poor little Blair said, "ugly."
Twenty years before, its gardens and meadows had stretched over
to the river; but the estate had long ago come down in size and
gone up in dollars. Now, there was scarcely an acre of sooty
green left, and it was pressed upon by the yards of the Maitland
Works, and almost islanded by railroad tracks. Grading had left
the stately and dilapidated old house somewhat above the level of
a street noisy with incessant teaming, and generally fetlock-deep
in black mud. The house stood a little back from the badly paved
sidewalk; its meager dooryard was inclosed by an iron fence--a