“Oh, no!  What’s the use of doing Niagara or the White Mountains, or even New York and Philadelphia and Washington, on the map?  I’ve been one of my little by-way trips, round among the villages; stopping wherever I found one cuddled in between a river and a hill, or in a little seashore nook.  Those are the places, after all, that I would hunt out, if I had plenty of money to go where I liked with.  It’s so pleasant to imagine how the people live there, and what sort of folks they would be likely to be.  It isn’t so much traveling as living round,—­awhile in one home, and then in another.  How many different little biding-places there are in the world!  And how queer it is only really to know about one or two of them!”

“What’s this place you’re at just now?  Winsted?”

“Yes; there’s where I’ve brought up, at the end of that bit of railroad.  It’s a bigger place than I fancied, though.  I always steer clear of the names that end in ‘ville.’  They’re sure to be stupid, money-making towns, all grown up in a minute, with some common man’s name tacked on to them, that happened to build a saw-mill, or something, first.  But Winsted has such a sweet, little, quiet, English sound.  I know it never began with a mill.  They make pins and clocks and tools and machines there now; and it’s ’the largest and most prosperous post-village of Litchfield County.’  But I don’t care for the pins and machinery.  It’s got a lake alongside of it; and Still River—­don’t that sound nice?—­runs through; and there are the great hills, big enough to put on the map, out beyond.  I can fancy where the girls take their sunset walks; and the moonlight parties, boating on the pond, and the way the woods look, round Still River.  Oh, yes! that’s one of the places I mean to go to.”

Leslie Goldthwaite lived in one of the inland cities of Massachusetts.  She had grown up and gone to school there, and had never yet been thirty miles away.  Her father was a busy lawyer, making a handsome living for his family, and laying aside abundantly for their future provision, but giving himself no lengthened recreations, and scarcely thinking of them as needful for the rest.

It was a pleasant, large, brown, wooden house they lived in, on the corner of two streets; with a great green door-yard about it on two sides, where chestnut and cherry trees shaded it from the public way, and flower-beds brightened under the parlor windows and about the porch.  Just greenness and bloom enough to suggest, always, more; just sweetness and sunshine and bird-song enough, in the early summer days, to whisper of broad fields and deep woods where they rioted without stint; and these days always put Leslie into a certain happy impatience, and set her dreaming and imagining; and she learned a great deal of her geography in the fashion that we have hinted at.

Miss Goldthwaite was singularly discursive and fragmentary in her conversation this morning, somehow.  She dropped the map-traveling suddenly, and asked a new question.  “And how comes on the linen-drawer?”