“I would as lief come across the staying one,” said Mrs. Holabird, with meekness.

It cooled down our enthusiasm.  Stephen, especially, was very much quenched.

The next one was not only somewhere, but everywhere, it seemed, and nowhere.  “Everything by turns and nothing long,” Barbara wrote up over the kitchen chimney with the baker’s chalk.  We had five girls between that time and our moving to Westover, and we had to move without a girl at last; only getting a woman in to do days’ work.  But I have not come to the family-moving yet.

The house-moving was the pretty part.  Every pleasant afternoon, while the building was upon the rollers, we walked over, and went up into all the rooms, and looked out of every window, noting what new pictures they gave as the position changed from day to day; how now this tree and now that shaded them:  how we gradually came to see by the end of the Haddens’ barn, and at last across it,—­for the slope, though gradual, was long,—­and how the sunset came in more and more, as we squared toward the west; and there was always a thrill of excitement when we felt under us, as we did again and again, the onward momentary surge of the timbers, as the workmen brought all rightly to bear, and the great team of oxen started up.  Stephen called these earthquakes.

We found places, day by day, where it would be nice to stop.  It was such a funny thing to travel along in a house that might stop anywhere, and thenceforward belong.  Only, in fact, it couldn’t; because, like some other things that seem a matter of choice, it was all pre-ordained; and there was a solid stone foundation waiting over on the west side, where grandfather meant it to be.

We got little new peeps at the southerly hills, in the fresh breaks between trees and buildings that we went by.  As we reached the broad, open crown, we saw away down beyond where it was still and woodsy; and the nice farm-fields of Grandfather Holabird’s place looked sunny and pleasant and real countrified.

It was not a steep eminence on either side; if it had been the great house could not have been carried over as it was.  It was a grand generous swell of land, lifting up with a slow serenity into pure airs and splendid vision.  We did not know, exactly, where the highest point had been; but as we came on toward the little walled-in excavation which seemed such a small mark to aim at, and one which we might so easily fail to hit after all, we saw how behind us rose the green bosom of the field against the sky, and how, day by day, we got less of the great town within our view as we settled down upon our side of the ridge.

The air was different here, it was full of hill and pasture.

There were not many trees immediately about the spot where we were to be; but a great group of ashes and walnuts stood a little way down against the roadside, and all around in the far margins of the fields were beautiful elms, and round maples that would be globes of fire in autumn days, and above was the high blue glory of the unobstructed sky.