The lonely toiling of the man was not lonely to him. He was strong and rejoiced in work, and there was ever Melissa and always something to be done for her. From the front door of the house down to the roadway he made a wide gravelled path and along its sides he made beds of old-fashioned pinks and sowed and planted larkspur and phlox and dahlias and peonies and golden coreopsis and bachelor's buttons and other flowers named in the circulars of a seed firm in the distant city. He made a neat picket gate in the fence where the walk opened on the roadway and beside the fence he had hollyhocks, and sunflowers, the latter trying every day to see Melissa, and turning their heads resolutely from sunrise until evening and going to sleep every night with their faces toward her home, which was in the West. Close beside the house he planted rosebushes and "old hen and chickens" and lady-slippers and morning-glories, and a madeira vine for the porch. There was a path from the front around the house to the kitchen--which had a porch as well--and beside this path Jason had planted an abundance of sweet briar, thinking as he did so how its faint, sweet fragrance and fair blossoms would match Melissa. A hop-vine clambered up the kitchen porch. Jason was thirty years old, now, and Melissa twenty-five. One day old man Trumbull, who was a great trader, suddenly disposed of his farm and moved into the adjacent county. Somehow, the news did not have much effect on Jason Goodell. It would be as easy to bring her from thirty miles away as from where she had lived, he reasoned. The only difference to come would be that he would not see her often in the interval. There had never been any correspondence between them and it did not occur to Jason to write now. There came a hard winter, the horses and cattle and other stock required close attendance, and Jason was much about the house. It was at this time when he discovered the faults of the kitchen floor, which was of pine. The boards had shrunk and there were cracks and the soft wood had worn away under the tread of his heavy feet. That sort of kitchen floor would never do for Melissa! He made a new floor and was happy at his labor all through "the big snow." The floor was of hard, seasoned ash, matched perfectly and smooth as the floor of a ball-room. "It will be easier to mop" said he, and thought of Melissa's sunbonnet, and of how it would look hanging against the whitewashed wall.