“Now, you set thar and rest,” she commanded, “till Lizzie does up her work and has time to play with you.  You Lizzie!  Hurry and wash them dishes and sweep this floor and dust my room and then take the little old lady’s breakfast to her.  It’s in the stove, keeping warm.”

“Let me help Lizzie,” begged Anne.  “I know how to sweep and dust and wash dishes.  We had to do those things—­turn about, you know—­at the ‘Home.’”

“You set right still,” repeated Mrs. Collins, “and let some meat grow on yo’ po’ little bones.  I know how they treat you at them ’sylums, making you work day in, day out.  Oh, it’s a dog’s life!”

“But, Mrs. Collins, they were good to me, and kind as could be.  I didn’t have to work so hard.  I just did the things that Lizzie does.”

“Uh!  Lizzie!” was the response, “that’s diff’rent.  She’s at home.  She works when I tell her—­if she chooses,” Mrs. Collins concluded with a chuckle, for Lizzie had dropped her broom and was sitting in the middle of the floor pulling Honey-Sweet’s shoes and stockings off and on.

Anne went outdoors presently to look around the dear old place.  ’Lewis Hall,’ a roomy frame-house built before the Revolution, was on a hill which sloped gently toward the corn-fields and meadows that bordered the lazy river beyond which rose the bluffs of Buckingham.  Back of the house, a level space was laid out in a formal garden.  The boxwood, brought from England when that was the mother country, met across the turf walks.  Long-neglected flowers—­damask and cabbage roses, zinnias, cock’s-comb, hollyhocks—­grew half-wild, making masses of glowing color.  Along the walks, where there had paced, a hundred years before, stately Lewis ladies in brocade and stately Lewis gentlemen in velvet coats, now tripped an orphan girl, a stranger in her father’s home.  But she was a very happy little maid as she roamed about the spacious old garden on that sunshiny summer day, gathering hollyhocks and zinnias for ladies to occupy her playhouse in the gnarled roots of an old oak-tree.

When Lizzie came out to play, she and Anne wandered away to the fields.  There was a dear little baby brook—­how well Anne remembered it!—­that started from a spring on the hillside, trickled among the under-brush, loitered through the meadow, and emptied into a larger stream that fed the river.

“Let’s take off our shoes and stockings,” said Anne, tripping joyfully along, “and wade to the creek.  You’ve been there?  Part of the way is sandy.  Your feet crunch down in the nice cool sand.  Part of the way there are rocks—­flat, mossy ones.  They’re so pretty—­and slippery!  It’s fun not knowing when you are going to fall down.”

“There’s bamboo-vines,” objected Lizzie.  “Mother’ll whip me if I tear my dress.”

“Oh, we’ll stoop down and crawl under the vines.”  Anne was ready of resource.  “And we’ll dry our dresses in the sun before we go home.  Oh, Lizzie!  Look at all the little fishes!  Let’s catch them!  Do don’t let them get by.  Aren’t they slippery!  Tell you what let’s play.  Let’s be Jamestown settlers and catch fish to keep us from starving.  We’ll have our settlement here by the brook—­the river James, we’ll play it is.”