Five thousand pounds

Transcriber's note: Unusual and inconsistent spelling is as printed.
CHAP.
UP to the age of fourteen I think I spent as happy a life as any child in any cottage home in England. There is many a cottage which is no home at all, in the true sense of the word, notwithstanding those pretty words of poetry about—
The cottage homes of England,
By thousands in her plains;
but ours was one.
It stood on a bit of country road, with three or four other cottages, close outside a biggish town. We had a large pond in front, and lots of trees beyond and on both sides of the pond; and the shadows of the trees used to look very pretty on a summer evening, when the light from the sun came creeping through them with a red glow like firelight. The water would catch the glow, till it was all one sheet of brightness, and the trees seemed bending down to look at their own likenesses below, for every branch and twig and leaf might be seen there, pictured.
Sometimes a breeze would ruffle the surface, and then there were little wavelets, with red on one side and grey on the other, and the pictured branches and leaves had a snaky sort of movement in and out of one another. And if a duck swam across, leaving its little track, that made another break in the smooth picture.
I used to stand and watch these things, and wonder at the ripples and the brightness. Sometimes I asked father the why of this or that, for I was an inquisitive child, but he always said, Don't know, my girl, and went off to his pipe; so it was not of much use to ask him. If I put the same questions to mother, she commonly said, How can I tell? Don't bother! and that shut me up.
And if I went to grannie, she would say, Because God made it so, Phœbe. This was all right and true, but I would have liked to understand a little more about the beautiful things which God has made. I used to wonder then, and I often wonder now, how it is that people care so little to look into such matters.