THE FIDDLER OF APPLE TREE LANE
People said that the Brighton children could "never manage," when it was said that they were planning to live in the little cottage on the hill above Medford Valley.
"There's always a wind there from the sea, dearie," said old Granny Fullerton to Barbara Brighton. "It will search out your very bones, come winter."
Barbara shook her head cheerfully. A plump and rosy young person of twelve years old does not worry much about cold winds.
People said also, with the strange blindness of those who can live close by for years and yet never know what is in their neighbors' hearts, that it was an odd thing that Howard Brighton should have built that little house so far from the town in the midst of that great stretch of wild land where so few folk lived.
"It is marshy in the valley and wooded on the hills," Granny Fullerton said to Barbara, "with never a neighbor for miles. Of course the land has been in your family time out of mind, but those that are your nearest kin have always lived in the town. What could Howard Brighton have been thinking to do such a thing!"
They did not know how he had toiled and planned in his narrow little office down near the wharves of the seaport town, how he and his wife had dreamed together that their three children should live in some other place than on the cramped, stony street where they had been born. After his wife's death he had still gone forward with his dream and, when he found that he had, himself, not very long to live, he had made haste to build the cottage that they had so greatly desired.
"It is pleasure enough to think of the children's having it," he said to a plain-spoken neighbor who remonstrated with him on the ground that he could never live there. "The boys will be old enough to care for their sister, and the house on the hill will be just the place for a little maid to grow up."
His children were of widely separated ages, for Ralph, the eldest, was twenty-one, Felix seventeen, and Barbara, as has been said, only twelve. It happened also that they had not all of them the same tastes, for while the two younger ones loved the country and looked forward to living on the Windy Hill, Ralph's desire was to go on working in the dusty office where he had already begun to prosper.
"He is a good getter, but a poor spender," the neighbors said, and in this were right. Ralph, with his first success, had begun to think too much of money and too little of other things.