farther up the river. And from the undoubted dearth of both we escaped with a pretence to the effect that we were under a spell, and that some day, the witch having died, we should walk on our hill and find the wintergreen come and the arbutus under the leaves.
By five o’clock we had been hungry for two hours, and we spread our lunch on the crest. Prospect Hill was the place to which we took our guests when we had them. It was the wide west gateway of the town, where through few ventured, for it opened out on the bend of the little river, navigable only to rowboats and launches, and flowing toward us from the west. You stood at the top of a sharp declivity, and it was like seeing a river face to face to find it flowing straight toward you, out of the sky, bearing little green islands and wet yellow sandbars. It almost seemed as if these must come floating toward us and bringing us everything. . . . For these were the little days, when we still believed that everything was necessary.
We quickly despatched the process of “trading off,” a sandwich for an apple, a cooky for a cake, and so on, occasionally trading back
