All her life she had looked with awe upward out of her valley toward that great house.  Its lawns with stately clumps of evergreens, its many servants, its distant lights often seen twinkling in the windows at night, the tales that reached her of wonderful music and faery dancing; the flashing family carriages which had so often whirled past her on the turnpike with scornful footman and driver—­all these recollections revisited her to-night.  In the morning she was to cross the boundary of this inaccessible world as one who was to hold a high position in it.

How pictures came crowding back!  One of the earliest recollections of childhood was hearing the scream of the Meredith peacocks as they drew their gorgeous plumage across the silent summer lawns; at home they had nothing better than fussing guineas.  She had never come nearer to one of those proud birds than handling a set of tail feathers which Mrs. Meredith had presented to her mother for a family fly brush.  Pansy had good reason to remember because she had often been required to stand beside the table and, one little bare foot set alternately on the other little bare foot, wield the brush over the dishes till arms and eyelids ached.

Another of those dim recollections was pressing her face against the window-panes when the first snow began to fall on the scraggy cedars in the yard; and as she began to sing softly to herself one of the ancient ditties of the children of the poor, “Old Woman, picking Geese,” she would dream of the magical flowers which they told her bloomed all winter in a glass house at the Merediths’ while there was ice on the pines outside.  Big red roses and icicles separated only by a thin glass—­she could hardly believe it; and she would cast her eye toward their own garden where a few black withered stalks marked the early death-beds of the pinks and jonquils.

But even in those young years Pansy had little time to look out of windows and to dream of anything.  She must help, she must work; for she was the oldest of five children, and the others followed so closely that they pushed her out of her garments.  A hardy, self-helpful child life, bravened by necessities, never undermined by luxuries.  For very dolls Pansy used small dried gourds, taking the big round end of the gourd for the head of the doll and all the rest of the gourd for all the rest of the body.

One morning when she was fourteen, the other children were clinging with tears to her in a poor, darkened room—­she to be little mother to them henceforth:  they never clung in vain.

That same autumn when woods were turning red and wild grapes turning black and corn turning yellow, a cherished rockaway drawn by a venerated horse, that tried to stop for conversation on the highroad whenever he passed a neighbor’s vehicle, rattled out on the turnpike with five children in it and headed for town:  Pansy driving, taking herself and the rest to the public school.  For years thereafter,