Right in the edge of the town it stood, its fields stretching over the south slope of green hills in sunny uplands, and down in meadowy richness to the wild, hidden, sequestered river-side, where the brown water ran through a narrow, rocky valley,—­Swift River they called it.  There are a great many Swift Rivers in New England.  It was only a vehement little tributary of a larger stream, beside which lay larger towns; it was doing no work for the world, apparently, at present; there were no mills, except a little grist-mill to which the farmers brought their corn, cuddled among the rocks and wild birches and alders, at a turn where the road came down, and half a dozen planks made a bit of a bridge.

“O, what beautiful places!” cried Frank, as they crossed the little bridge, and glanced either way into a green, gray, silvery vista of shrubs and rocks, and rushing water, with the white spires of meadow-sweet and the pink hardback, and the first bright plumes of the golden rod nodding and shining against the shade,—­as they passed the head of a narrow, grassy lane, trod by cows’ feet, and smelling of their milky breaths, and the sweetness of hay-barns,—­as they came up, at length, over the long slope of turf that carpeted the way, as for a bride’s feet, from the roadside to the very threshold.  She looked along the low, treble-piled garden wall, too, and out to the open sheds, deep with pine chips; and upon the broad brown house-roof, with its long, gradual decline, till its eaves were within reach of a child’s fingers from the ground; and her quick eye took in facilities.

“O, if Laura could see this!  After the old shed-top in Brier Street, and the one tree!”

But Laura had got what the shed-top stood for with her; it was Frank who had hearkened to whole forests in the stir of the one brick-rooted fir.  To that which each child had, it was already given.

In a week or two Frank wrote Laura a letter.  It was an old-fashioned letter, you know; a big sheet, written close, four pages, all but the middle of the last page, which was left for the “superscription.”  Then it was folded, the first leaf turned down twice, lengthwise; then the two ends laid over, toward each other; then the last doubling, or rather trebling, across; and the open edge slipped over the folds.  A wafer sealed it, and a thimble pressed it,—­and there were twenty-five cents postage to pay.  That was a letter in the old times, when Laura and Frank Shiere were little girls.  And this was that letter:—­

DEAR LAURA,—­We got here safe, Aunt Oldways and I, a week ago last Saturday, and it is beautiful.  There is a green lane,—­almost everybody has a green lane,—­and the cows go up and down, and the swallows build in the barn-eaves.  They fly out at sundown, and fill all the sky up.  It is like the specks we used to watch in the sunshine when it came in across the kitchen, and they danced up and down and through and away, and