She had been born there, and had not been away from it for a whole week at a time for fifty-five years. She hardly knew any other house. The ground floor of the cottage contained a large, old-fashioned living-room, with two very small ones opening out of it, one of which was a kind of scullery, and the other the bedroom in which she had been born, and where she had slept all her life. Under the gable of the thatched roof there was a large attic covering the whole area of the cottage, with sloping ceiling and two windows, one at each end, looking east and west. Joanna's mind could not grasp the idea of any improvement in the arrangement of her little homestead. The tall, spare old woman was still very active and alert, with an eye keen to detect every weed venturing to grow in the garden, and every speck of dust that might blow in through the open window and door. Scarcely a bud opened on the roses and clematis climbing up the half-timber wall without her notice. The hollyhocks and sunflowers, standing as erect as herself, were every one known to her. The potato-patch behind the cottage, which her husband, Amos Terry, cultivated in his leisure time; the long rows of peas and beans; the beds of onions and lettuce; the fruit-trees which paid their rent—they were almost like children to her. Indoors, the old oak settle by the fireside, the oak table and dresser, all shining with the active work of her own hands, teemed with associations and memories which formed the sum and substance of her life. The roof-tree was not more planted to the spot than Joanna was. Still more firmly rooted there, if possible, was her only child, Charlotte, who lived in the pleasant attic under the roof. She was lame, and an invalid from a spinal complaint, the result of a fall when she was a little child. It was very seldom that she felt well enough to creep painfully down the rude staircase to the ground floor. But from her two windows her eye could overlook both of the garden patches lying before and behind the house; and she knew everything growing in them as well as her mother did. Eastward her view was bounded by a low ridge of hill, above which the morning clouds hung tinged with lovely hues some time before the sun showed itself over the wooded outline. To the west there was a wide stretch of undulating land, with meadows and coppices and scattered cottages, ending far-off in a glimpse of the sea, which often glittered like gold under the setting of the sun. Charlotte seldom missed seeing both sunrise and sunset.