Grandmother’s house was one of a little group of white houses standing on the ledges at the top of the hill. These formed the tiny village within a village which was called the “New City.” Ella was always so happy at her grandmother’s that long after she was old enough to go to Sunday school, she always confused the “New City” with the “New Jerusalem.”
This was the “village grandma,” as Ella called her. But there was also the “mountain grandma,” and it was to her house that the little girl and her mother were going. Now when good New Englanders are starting for anywhere, they always begin by taking the morning train to Boston; so of course that was what our two travelers did.
Going to Boston, even if she did not go any farther, was a great treat to Ella. There were windows full of blankbooks, and what stories she could write in them, she thought longingly. There were whole stores full of toys; and in the window of one of these stores lay a box of tin soldiers. Ella looked again. It was exactly like the box that she had wanted. Maybe it was the very same one. It certainly was the same store.
“Mother,” she said, “that is my box of tin soldiers that uncle did not give me; but I’m so old now that I don’t care for it. I’d rather have the muff.”
“Don’t you love your uncle enough to forget that?” her mother asked.
“I love him better than almost anybody in the world,” said Ella, “and I do forget it except when I happen to think of it. But he really did break his promise,” she added slowly.
They left the stores and went to the Common. Ella’s little book of history said that in the Revolutionary War the Americans pitched their tents on the Common; and she fancied that she knew just where those tents stood. She had also read about the battle of Bunker Hill, and she never felt that she was really in Boston until she had caught sight of the monument in memory of it standing tall and gray against the northern sky.
At one side of the Common was the Capitol. The mother told Ella that the laws for the whole State of Massachusetts were made in that building.
“Do they ever make a mistake and make a bad law?” asked Ella.
“Perhaps they do sometimes,” the mother replied rather unwillingly, for she wanted her little girl to grow up with deep respect for the institutions of her country.