you absolutely must, from some farm where the owner’s wife does not know every feathered thing by heart and with her heart.
Here we are now at the house. . . . It is the rarest thing to happen, but I am afraid Mrs. Ross really must be out, or Shot’s frenzied barking from the pines would surely bring her to the door. Just a little grey, unpainted cottage, as you see; with four rooms in it, and an attic overhead, that runs the whole length and breadth of the house. The cold South room is the dairy and apple-store; it is always fragrant with fruit, and bright with wide tin milk-pans brimmed with cream. These two front rooms that take the morning sun are the bedroom and the little sitting-room; the kitchen, at the back, gets the sunset. The attic is the choicest room of all, to my mind, with its wide views—seaward over the plain at one end, at the other out into the heart of the mountains; or, rather, that mountain-window in reality is a door—fling it open, and you stand in a
“Bright chamber level with the air,”
and level also with the velvet middle depth of a great old pine-tree, breathing spice, where the birds love to hop up and down, and the raindrops play at being diamonds.
But Catherine glories in her scrap of a sitting-room, with its motley collection of furniture, bought bit by bit at sales, transmogrified to meet the Sunshine needs, and upholstered by patient fingers into an effect somehow harmoniously old-fashioned, although the stuffs are new. And both of them are immensely proud of the whole dwelling—for did
