settlement of the place, dwellings had successively risen close to the
hill's foot, and the meadow that lay on the other side of the road--a
fertile tract--had been cultivated; and these three young people were the
children's children's children of persons of respectability who had dwelt
there,--Rose Garfield, in a small house, the site of which is still
indicated by the cavity of a cellar, in which I this very past summer
planted some sunflowers to thrust their great disks out from the hollow
and allure the bee and the humming-bird; Robert Hagburn, in a house of
somewhat more pretension, a hundred yards or so nearer to the village,
standing back from the road in the broader space which the retreating
hill, cloven by a gap in that place, afforded; where some elms intervened
between it and the road, offering a site which some person of a natural
taste for the gently picturesque had seized upon. Those same elms, or
their successors, still flung a noble shade over the same old house, which
the magic hand of Alcott has improved by the touch that throws grace,
amiableness, and natural beauty over scenes that have little pretension in
themselves.

Now, the other young man, Septimius Felton, dwelt in a small wooden house,
then, I suppose, of some score of years' standing,--a two-story house,
gabled before, but with only two rooms on a floor, crowded upon by the
hill behind,--a house of thick walls, as if the projector had that sturdy
feeling of permanence in life which incites people to make strong their
earthly habitations, as if deluding themselves with the idea that they
could still inhabit them; in short, an ordinary dwelling of a well-to-do
New England farmer, such as his race had been for two or three generations
past, although there were traditions of ancestors who had led lives of
thought and study, and possessed all the erudition that the universities
of England could bestow. Whether any natural turn for study had descended
to Septimius from these worthies, or how his tendencies came to be