“Youth likes change,” returned her mother, with a sigh, “but Agnes, child, it is not worth while your biding here all night talking of it. Go to bed, my lass. To-morrow will come soon enough, no matter how late we sit up, and you have a long journey before you.” She spoke so gravely that suddenly it came to Agnes that the exciting plan in which she was so deeply concerned meant more than change and adventure; it meant hardship and separations from those she loved; it meant long absence from her mother and the little ones; it meant the parting from old neighbors and the giving up of the old home where she was born. So she very soberly made her good nights and went to her chilly upper room with a serious countenance. The wind whistling around the corners of the house, shrieking through the keyholes and sighing about the chimney, sounded particularly doleful to her that night as she lay snuggled down in the big feather-bed by the side of her little sister Margret, and she remained awake for a long time. Life had gone on evenly enough for all the fifteen years that this had been her home, and the boundaries of the big farm seemed likely to hedge her in for some years to come, but within a year her grandfather and grandmother had both died, and her father, who as the youngest child had always lived at home with the old folks, now must possess only a share of the farm, and the elder brothers, already prosperous men, would claim their heritage. “It was right of father not to be willing to settle down here on a little bit of a tract and have them all free enough with their advice but with nothing else,” thought Agnes. “My uncles are a canny, thrifty set, but they save, and save, and never remember that but for his care of his parents my father, too, might own his own homestead, and grandfather forgot, too. Perhaps he thought the others would give the farm to father,--he ought to have it,--but they are too stingy to give it and he is too proud to ask it. I am glad my grandmother was not their mother, for father is far different. Dear father! Oh, yes, I am glad to go with him. He deserves to have all the comfort he can get after being treated so hardly by his family. We were always good comrades, my father and I; for I was the baby all those years before Sandy came,--three years.” But the reckoning of years soon became lost in the land of dreams, and the song of the wind in the chimney was Agnes’s last lullaby in the old home.