cornices and to festoon the pictures, but which were really strings, colored in imitation of the real vine, and spreading out into paper foliage.  To complete the naturalistic character of these everlasting vines, which no scale-bugs could assail, there were bunches of wonderful grapes depending here and there to excite the cupidity of both bird and child.  There was no cruelty in the nature of Patience, and she made prisoners of neither birds nor squirrels, but cunning cages here and there held most lifelike counterfeits of their willing captives.  There was nothing in the room that was alive, except the dainty owner, but it seemed to be a museum of natural history.  The rugs on the floor were of her own devising and sewing together, and rivaled in color and ingenuity those of Bokhara.

But Patience was a student of the heavens as well as of the earth, and it was upon the ceiling that her imagination expanded.  There one could see in their order the constellations of the heavens, represented by paper-gilt stars, of all magnitudes, most wonderful to behold.  This part of her decorations was the most difficult of all.  The constellations were not made from any geography of the heavens, but from actual nightly observation of the positions of the heavenly bodies.  Patience confessed that the getting exactly right of the Great Dipper had caused her most trouble.  On the night that was constructed she sat up till three o’clock in the morning, going out and studying it and coming in and putting up one star at a time.  How could she reach the high ceiling?  Oh, she took a bean-pole, stuck the gilt star on the end of it, having paste on the reverse side, and fixed it in its place.  That was easy, only it was difficult to remember when she came into the house the correct positions of the stars in the heavens.  What the astronomer and the botanist and the naturalist would have said of this little kingdom is unknown, but Patience herself lived among the glories of the heavens and the beauties of the earth which she had created.  Probably she may have had a humorous conception of this, for she was not lacking in a sense of humor.  The stone step that led to her private door she had skillfully painted with faint brown spots, so that when visitors made their exit from this part of the house they would say, “Why, it rains!” but Patience would laugh and say, “I guess it is over by now.”

III

“I’m not going to follow you about any more through the brush and brambles, Phil Burnett,” and Celia, emerging from the thicket into a clearing, flung herself down on a knoll under a beech-tree.

Celia was cross.  They were out for a Saturday holiday on the hillside, where Phil said there were oceans of raspberries and blueberries, beginning to get ripe, and where you could hear the partridges drumming in the woods, and see the squirrels.

“Why, I’m not a bit tired,” said Phil; “a boy wouldn’t be.”  And he threw himself down on the green moss, with his heels in the air, much more intent on the chatter of a gray squirrel in the tree above him than on the complaints of his comrade.