The morning after the fire found the family at breakfast over with the Judge’s family.  It was impossible as yet for the girls to feel the full reaction over their loss.  As the Judge remarked, youth responds to change and variety quicker than any new interest, and they were already planning a wonderful reconstruction period.  Kit and Billy rode down on horseback to look at the ruins, and came back with an encouraging report.  The back of the house was badly damaged, but the main building stood intact, though the charred clapboards and wide vacant windows looked desolate enough.

“Thank goodness the wind was from the south, and blew the flames away from the pines,” said Kit, dropping into her chair, hungrily.  “Doesn’t it seem good to get some of Cousin Roxy’s huckleberry pancakes again, girls?  Oh yes, we met my prisoner—­I should say, my erstwhile prisoner—­on the road.  He was tapping chestnut trees over on Peck’s Hill like a woodpecker.  You needn’t laugh, Doris, ’cause Billie saw him too, didn’t you, Bill?  And he’s got a sweet forgiving nature.  He doffed his hat to me and I smiled back just as though I’d never caught him in our berry patch, and had Shad lock him up in the corn-crib.”

“Was he heading this way?” the Judge asked.  “I want him to look at my peach trees and tell me what in tunket ails them.”

“Why, Judge, I’m surprised at you, and before the children, too.”  Cousin Roxy’s eyes twinkled with mirth at having caught the Judge in a lapse.

“I only said tunket, Roxy,” he began, but Cousin Roxy cut him short.

“Tunket’s been good Connecticut for Tophet ever since I was knee high to a toadstool, and we won’t say anything more about that.  Jerry will be glad to go up with you to the peach orchard, and you can take the youngsters with you.  I want Jean and Kit to drive over with us and help fix Maple Lawn.”

But before a week was out, all of the carefully laid plans for housing the “robins” before snow fell were knocked higher than a kite.  Kit said that one of the most delightful things about country life, anyway, was its uncertainty.  You went ahead and laid a lot of plans on the lap of the Norns, and then the old ladies stood up and scattered everything helter-skelter.  The beauty of it was, though, that they usually turned around and handed you unexpected gifts so much better than anything you had hoped for, that you were left without a chance for argument.

The family had taken up its new quarters at Maple Lawn, and two of the local carpenters, Mr. Peleg Weaver, Philemon’s brother, and Mr. Delaplaine, had been persuaded to devote a portion of their valuable time to rehabilitating Greenacre Farm.  It took tact and persuasion to induce the aforesaid gentlemen to desert their favorite chairs on the little stoop in front of Byers’ Grocery Store, and approach anything resembling daily toil.  There had been a Squire in the Weaver family three generations back, and Peleg held firmly to established precedent.  He might be landed gentry, but he was no tiller of the soil, and he secretly looked down on his elder brother for personally cultivating the family acres.