Across the Salem Road from Mr. Atherton Bell's house there were many level meadows of a pleasant greenness, as far as Cum-ming's alder swamp; and these meadows were called the Bow Meadows. If you take the alder swamp and the Bow Meadows together, they were like this: the swamp was mysterious and unvisited, except by those who went to fish in the Muck Hole for turtles and eels. Frogs with solemn voices lived in the swamp. Herons flew over it slowly, and herons also are uncanny affairs. We believed that the people of the swamp knew things it was not good to know, like witchcraft and the insides of the earth. In the meadows, on the other hand, there were any number of cheerful and busy creatures, some along the level of the buttercups, but most of them about the roots of the grasses. The people in the swamp were wet, cold, sluggish, and not a great many of them. The people of the meadows were dry, warm, continually doing something, and in number not to be calculated by any rule in Wentworth's Arithmetic. So you see how different were the two, and how it comes about that the meadows were nearly the best places in the world to be in, both because of the society there, and because of the swamp near at hand and interesting to think about. So, too, you see why it was that Bobby Bell could be found almost any summer day “bobbing” for grasshoppers in the Bow Meadows--“bobbing” meaning to go up and down like Bobby Bell, to talk to one's self and not to hear any one shout; and “grasshoppers” being interesting because of their heads resembling door knobs or green cheeses, because of the crooks in their legs, and because of their extraordinary habit of jumping. There were in Hagar at this time four ladies who lived at a little distance from the Salem Road and Mr. Atherton Bell's house, on a road which goes over a hill and off to a district called Scrabble Up and Down, where huckleberries and sweet fern mostly grow. They were known as the Tuttle Four Women, being old Mrs. Tuttle and the three Miss Tuttles, of whom Miss Rachel was the eldest. It is easy to understand why Miss Rachel and the children of the village of Hagar did not get along well together, when you consider how clean she was, how she walked so as never to fall over anything, nor took any interest in squat tag, nor resembled the children of the village of Hagar in any respect. And so you can understand how it was that, when she came down the hill that Saturday afternoon and saw Bobby Bell through the bars in the Bow Meadows, she did not understand his actions, and disapproved of them, whatever they were.