One of these streets was a broad avenue, promising to be good looking after it was finished, but very ugly now. It was so much wider than the old road it was taking the place of that it cut off an old front yard entirely, and the house there which had been a number of feet from its old front gate was now almost exactly on a line with the stone wall at the edge of the avenue. That was the reason why the girl looked hard at the wall and at the house and then turned to the boy, exclaiming: “Why, Rodney Nelson! Your folks are just walled in! How on earth are you going to get out?” It looked like it, for the side streets, crossing the avenue at the ends of the square, were built up in the same way and on the fourth side, to which their backs were turned, were the backs of a solid row of buildings, fronting upon another avenue. “You can’t get over that wall,” said Rodney. “Billy’s tried it, everywhere, and he can climb anything that isn’t straight up and down.” He seemed to be pretty cheerful about it, nevertheless, whoever Billy might be. “Tell you what,” she said, “you can come across and get out through our house and the shop, till you can put up some stairs, or a ladder.” “Guess we’ll have to,” replied Rodney, “but Billy’s got to stay at home, now. They finished the last of that wall, this morning. Come on upstairs and see how mother’s going to get in, this evening.” In half a minute more they were up in the room over the parlor and she at once remarked: “O! I see! your mother’ll climb in at the second story windows.” “She won’t have to climb,” said Rodney. “Look here.” The Nelson house was old, but it was not large. That second story had but four rooms, two of them of good size, two of them, at each end of its entry, quite small. The large front room, however, had an ample bay window that jutted out, now, almost over the edge of the wall. That was not the window Rodney went to, but the one in the little room on the left, and he had it open in a twinkling. “There, Millie,” he said, “I can nail down some pieces of board and mother can step right in. She won’t need any ladder. We can change things around, too, and bring the parlor up here.” “That’ll do,” said Millie, “but it isn’t as good as a door. I wouldn’t want to live in a house that’s upside down, anyway. That avenue won’t be anything but mud, till they pave it and put in the sidewalks. I’m glad we can’t be walled in or lose our doors and windows.” “It changes everything for us,” said Rodney. “I don’t quite know what to make of it, yet, but I’ve loads of work to do, all day, to have things right when mother comes home.” “So have I!” exclaimed Millie, and away she went, downstairs, to go home across lots, while he stepped out of the window and turned to stare, in a puzzled way, at all of his house that stuck up above the new avenue. It certainly was not the same house it had been, and all the ground around it was walled in, but, after all, Rodney was the same boy.