But first Milly had drawn mother into a corner where no one could see, and there, with a couple of tears in her two blue eyes, she had whispered in a great hurry, so that Mrs. Norton could scarcely hear, “I don’t want to have everything just as I like, to-day, mother.  Can’t I do what somebody else likes?  I’d rather.”

Which means that Milly was a good deal excited, and her heart very full, and that she was thinking of how, a year before, her birthday had been rather spoilt toward the end of it by a little bit of crossness and self-will, that she remembered afterward with a pang for many a long day.  Since then, Milly had learnt a good deal more of that long, long lesson, which we go on learning, big people and little people, all our lives—­the lesson of self-forgetting—­of how love brings joy, and to be selfish is to be sad; and her birthday seemed to bring back to her all that she had been learning.

“Dear little woman,” said Mrs. Norton, putting back her tangled hair from her anxious little face, “go and be happy.  That’s what we all like to-day.  Besides, you’ll find plenty of ways of doing what other people like before the end of the day without my inventing any.  Run along now, and climb away.  Mind you don’t let Olly tumble into bogs, and mind you bring me a bunch of ferns for the dinner-table—­and there’ll be two things done at any rate.”

So away ran Milly; and all the morning she and Olly and father scrambled and climbed, and raced and chatted, on the green back of old Brownholme.  They went to say good-morning to John Backhouse’s cows in the “intake,” as he called his top field, and they just peeped over the wall at the fierce young bull he had bought at Penrith fair a few days before, and which looked as if, birthdays or no birthdays, he could have eaten Milly at two mouthfuls, and swallowed Olly down afterwards without knowing it.

Then they climbed and climbed after father, till, just as Olly was beginning to feel his legs to make sure they weren’t falling off, they were so tired and shaky—­there they were standing on the great pile of stones which marks the top of the mountain—­the very tip-top of all its green points and rocks and grassy stretches.  By this time the children knew the names of most of the mountains around, and of all the lakes.  They went through them now like a lesson with their father; and even Olly remembered a great many, and could chatter about Helvellyn, and Fairfield, and Langdale Pikes, as if he had trudged to the top of them all himself.

Then came the getting down again.  Father and Milly and Olly hand-in-hand, racing over the short fine grass, startling the little black-faced sheep, and racing down the steep bits, where Milly and Olly generally tumbled over in some sort of a heap at the bottom.  As for the flowers they gathered, there were so many I have no time to tell you about them—­wood-flowers and bog-flowers and grass-flowers, and ferns of all sizes to mix with them, from the great Osmunda, which grew along the Ravensnest Beck, down to the tiny little parsley fern.  It was all delightful—­the sights and the sounds, and the fresh mountain wind that blew them about on the top so that long afterward Milly used to look back to that walk on Brownholme when she was seven years old as one of the merriest times she ever spent.