Over the way from the Institution stood the workshop, where blind men and women, many of them graduates of the Institution, made mattresses and pillows, mats and brooms. This was another favorite haunt of ours. There was a stuffy but not unpleasant smell of feathers and hemp about the place. I should know that smell if I met it in Siberia! There were coils of rope, sometimes so large that one could squat down and hide in the middle, piles of hemp, and dark mysterious bins full of curled hair, white and black. There was a dreadful mystery about the black-hair bin; the little ones ran past it, with their heads turned away. But they never told what it was, and one of them never knew. But the crowning joy of the workshop was the feather-room,--a long room, with smooth, clean floor; along one side of it were divisions, like the stalls in a stable, and each division was half filled with feathers. Boy and girl readers will understand what a joy this must have been,--to sit down in the feathers, and let them cover you up to the neck, and be a setting hen! or to lie at full length, and be a traveller lost in the snow,--Harry making it snow feathers till you were all covered up, and then turning into the faithful hound and dragging you out! or to play the game of “Winds,” and blow the feathers about the room! But old Margaret did not allow this last game, and we could do it only when she happened to go out for a moment, which was not very often. Old Margaret was the presiding genius of the feather-room, a half-blind woman, who kept the feathers in order and helped to sew up the pillows and mattresses. She was always kind to us, and let us rake feathers with the great wooden rake as much as we would. Later, when Laura was perhaps ten years old, she used to go and read to old Margaret. Mrs. Browning’s poems were making a new world for the child at that time, and she never felt a moment’s doubt about the old woman’s enjoying them: in after years doubts did occur to her. It was probably a quaint picture, if any one had looked in upon it: the long, low room, with the feather-heaps, white and dusky gray; the half-blind, withered crone, nodding over her knitting, and the little earnest child, throwing her whole soul into “The Romaunt of the Page,” or the “Rhyme of the Duchess May.” “Oh! the little birds sang east, And the little birds sang west, Toll slowly!” The first sound of the words carries me back through the years to the feather-room and old blind Margaret. CHAPTER IV. THE VALLEY.