PATTY IN THE SPRING-HOUSE. Patty had that morning gone to the spring-house, as usual, to strain the milk. Can it be possible that any benighted reader does not know what a spring-house is? A little log cabin six feet long by five feet wide, without floor, built where the great stream of water issues clear and icy cold from beneath the hill. The little cabin-like spring-house sits always in the hollow; as you approach it you look down upon the roof of rough shingles which Western people call "clapboards," you see the green moss that overgrows them and the logs, you see the new-born brook rush out from beneath the logs that hide its cradle, you lift the home-made latch and open the low door which creaks on its wooden hinges, you see the great perennial spring rushing up eagerly from its subterranean prison, you note how its clear cold waters lave the sides of the earthen crocks, and in the dim light and the fresh coolness, in the presence of the rich creaminess, you feel whole eclogues of poetry which you can never turn into words. It was in just such a spring-house that Patty Lumsden had hidden herself. She brought clean crocks--earthenware milk pans--from the shelf outside, where they had been airing to keep them sweet; she held the strainer in her left hand and poured the milk through it until each crock was nearly full; she adjusted them in their places among the stones, so that they stood half immersed in the cold current of spring water; she laid the smooth pine cover on each crock, and put a clean stone atop that to secure it. While she was thus putting away the milk her mind was on Morton. She wondered what her father had said to him yesterday. In the heart of her heart she resolved that if Morton loved her she would marry him in the face of her father's displeasure. She had never rebelled against the iron rule, but she felt herself full of power and full of endurance. She could go off into the wilderness with Morton; they would build them a cabin, with chinking and daubing, with puncheon floor and stick chimney; they would sleep, like other poor settlers, on beds of dry leaves, and they would subsist upon the food which Morton's unerring rifle would bring them from the forest. These were the humble cabin castles she was building. All girls weave a tapestry of the future; on Patty's the knight wore buck-skin clothes and a wolf-skin cap, and brought home, not the shields or spoils of the enemy, but saddles of venison and luscious bits of bear-meat to a lady in linsey or cheap cotton who looked out of no balcony but a cabin window, and who smoked her eyes with hanging pots upon a crane in a great fire-place. I know it sounds old-fashioned and sentimental in me to bay so, and yet how can it matter to a heart like Patty's what may be the scenery on the tapestry, if love be the warp and faith the woof? [Illustration: PATTY IN THE SPRING-HOUSE.]