"How would you like to hear about the wishing-well?"
"That sounds great!" declared Betty and then: "Could you begin it with 'Once upon a time?'"
"Surely," was the quick response, "and now I think of it, I'm sure you must have passed the old wishing-well on your way here. The old well was supposed to have magic power, and long ago when the old Paxton House was standing, people came, for miles around, to be near the old well in the garden, and wish for their heart's desire, feeling sure that their wish would be granted.
"Of course the idea was absurd, but the townspeople of those days were superstitious, so that if those things that they wished for beside the well never came to them, they thought that they must have forgotten to ask for them in the right way, and later they would try again.
"If they obtained the thing that they had wished for, they laid their good fortune entirely to the fact that the old well must have approved of them."
"And where is it!" Valerie asked. "You said that we must have passed it."
"The old well has a flat wooden cover over it now, with an iron bar to keep it in place, lest some one be careless and fall in, though now the wild blackberry vines have nearly hidden it from sight. Even now when only young leaves are on the brambles, the thorny stems make a network over the cover. The old Paxton House was gone before my time," Mrs. Derby said, "but a part of its fine wall remains. It was upon that wall that the wishers sat.
"Did you happen to notice a fine piece of wall that seemed to belong to no one at all, and ended in a broad field?"
"The idea!" cried Betty. "Why we sat on that piece of wall, and could have 'wished' just as well as not, if only we'd known it."
"And it's almost half-past four now," said Valerie. "S'pose we run along toward Glenmore, and stop just long enough to sit on the wall and wish. We can be on time at five, if we do that. Then we could come over some day when we've more time, and hear all about the well, and other stories, too."