The ground fell off suddenly into a great hill-dimple, just where the walls were laid; that was why Grandfather Holabird had chosen the spot.  There could be a cellar-kitchen; and it had been needful for the moving, that all the rambling, outrunning L, which had held the kitchens and woodsheds before, should be cut off and disposed of as mere lumber.  It was only the main building—­L-shaped still, of three very large rooms below and five by more subdivision above—­which had majestically taken up its line of march, like the star of empire, westward.  All else that was needful must be rebuilt.

Mother did not like a cellar-kitchen.  It would be inconvenient with one servant.  But Grandfather Holabird had planned the house before he offered it to us to live in.  What we were going to save in rent we must take out cheerfully in extra steps.

It was in the bright, lengthening days of April, when the bluebirds came fluttering out of fairy-land, that the old house finally stopped, and stood staring around it with its many eyes,—­wide open to the daylight, all its green winkers having been taken off,—­to see where it was and was likely to be for the rest of its days.  It had a very knowing look, we thought, like a house that had seen the world.

The sun walked round it graciously, if not inquisitively.  He flashed in at the wide parlor windows and the rooms overhead, as soon as he got his brow above the hill-top.  Then he seemed to sidle round southward, not slanting wholly out his morning cheeriness until the noonday glory slanted in.  At the same time he began with the sitting-room opposite, through the one window behind; and then through the long, glowing afternoon, the whole bright west let him in along the full length of the house, till he just turned the last corner, and peeped in, on the longest summer days, at the very front.  This was what he had got so far as to do by the time we moved in,—­as if he stretched his very neck to find out the last there was to learn about it, and whether nowhere in it were really yet any human life.  He quieted down in his mind, I suppose, when from morning to night he found somebody to beam at, and a busy doing in every room.  He took it serenely then, as one of the established things upon the earth, and put us in the regular list of homes upon his round, that he was to leave so many cubic feet of light at daily.

I think he might like to look in at that best parlor.  With the six snowy-curtained windows, it was like a great white blossom; and the deep-green carpet and the walls with vine-leaves running all over them, in the graceful-patterned paper that Rosamond chose, were like the moss and foliage among which it sprung.  Here and there the light glinted upon gilded frame or rich bronze or pure Parian, and threw out the lovely high tints, and deepened the shadowy effects, of our few fine pictures.  We had little of art, but that little was choice.  It was Mr.