Too young at first to understand the reasons for my decision, they are now in agreement with me that we can never again live in the Homestead. They love every tree, every shrub on the old place. The towering elms, the crow's nest in the maples, the wall of growing woodbine, the gaunt, wide-spreading butternut branches,--all these are very dear to them, for they are involved with their earliest memories, touched with the glamour which the imagination of youth flings over the humblest scenes of human life. To them the Fern Road, The Bubbling Spring, and the Apple Tree Glen, scenes of many camping places, are all a part of childhood's fairy kingdom. The thought of never again walking beneath those familiar trees or sitting in those familiar rooms, is painful to them, and yet I am certain that their Neshonoc, like my own, is a realm remembered, a region to which they can return only on the wings of memory or of dream. Happily the allurement of art, the stimulus of ambition and the promise of love and honor already partly compensate them for their losses. Their faces are set to the future. On them I rest my hopes. By means of them and their like, Life weaves her endless web. End of Project Gutenberg's A Daughter of the Middle Border, by Hamlin Garland