“I’ll just take her shoes off and cover her and leave her till morning,” said Lizzie.

But Amos, gazing at his two ill-kempt little daughters, at the chaotic room, did not answer except to murmur to himself, “Oh, Patience!  Patience!”

The cottage was somewhat isolated.  Amos was three quarters of a mile from his work.  The schoolhouse was a mile away and the nearest trolley, which Lizzie must take to do the family shopping, was half a mile back along the dirt road.

Nevertheless, all the family felt that they had taken a distinct step upward in moving into lake shore property and nobody complained of distances.  Amos began putting in his Sundays in cleaning up the bramble-grown acres he intended to turn into a garden in the spring.  He could not afford to have it plowed so he spaded it all himself, during the wonderful bright fall Sabbaths.  Nor was this a hardship for Amos.  Only the farm bred can realize the reminiscent joy he took in wrestling with the sod, which gave up the smell that is more deeply familiar to man than any other in the range of human experience.

A dairy farmer named Norton, up the road, gave him manure in exchange for the promise of early vegetables for his table.  After his spading was done in late September, Amos, with his wheelbarrow, followed by the two children, began his trips between the dairy farm and his garden patch and he kept these up until the garden was deep with fertilizer.

There never had been a more beautiful autumn than this.  There was enough rain to wet down the soil for the winter, yet the Sundays were almost always clear.  Fields and woods stretched away before the cottage, crimson and green as the frosts came on.  Back of the cottage, forever gleaming through the scarlet of the autumn oaks, lay the lake, where duck and teal were beginning to lodge o’ nights, in the rice-fringed nooks along the shore.

Lydia was happier than she had been since her mother’s death.  She took the long tramps to and from school, lunch box and school bag slung at her back, in a sort of ecstasy.  She was inherently a child of the woods and fields.  Their beauty thrilled her while it tranquilized her.  Some of the weight of worry and responsibility that she had carried since her baby sister of two weeks had been turned over to her care left her.

Kent was enchanted with the new home.  Football was very engrossing, yet he managed to get out for at least one visit a week.  He and Lydia discovered a tiny spring in the bank above the lake and they began at once to dam it in and planned a great series of ditches and canals.

The doll’s furniture was finished by October and Lydia began work on the doll’s house.

One Saturday afternoon early in October she was established on the front steps with her carpentry when a surrey stopped at the gate.  Little Patience, in a red coat, rolled to her feet.  She had been collecting pebbles from the gravel walk.