'Lisbeth noticed that her mother, and Gorham, and Dickon, and Trotty did not go in any rooms of the tall house but two; she found that these two were at the top of the house, and that they had nothing to do with those underneath; she found out that there was a great clatter in the house, and in the next houses, as though the whole town were talking; she wondered how she liked it; but she concluded that she liked it very much; she was living in London, how could she help liking it?
Mother looked solemn, and the rooms looked black, and the things were tumbled upside down, and the air was hot, and the noise kept everybody awake, and everybody was half tired to death, and nothing was as bright as it might have been—not even the tallow candle—but they were in London, a hundred miles from the mile-stone; a hundred miles from the church steeple, and the mill, and the dear bit of a house where they had all grown, and rolled, and tumbled; and from the meadows with the flowers sleeping side by side; but they were in London, what did it matter?
Yet if they really were in London, while they slept they dreamed they were playing, and walking and talking under the shadow of the church steeple, and by the mill, and chasing butterflies over the meadows where the flowers were fast asleep, and forgot that the rooms were black, and the air hot, and that things were not as they had been.
CHAPTER IX.
'Lisbeth learned a great many things very soon, though she was not at school. A very great many things indeed; and they were not always pleasant things. She learned, for one thing, that they grew poorer every day, instead of growing richer. She learned that the dirty little street, too little to be a real street, was not as pleasant to look upon as the garden plot at home, and the green of the fields over the way. She learned that mother grew thinner, and that the boys grew dirtier and crosser, and the people down stairs, she found out, were not like the mill hands at home, the mill hands and the little children.
She saw a great many fine sights; she saw shops which made her open her eyes; and houses which astonished her to behold, and carriages which took her breath away, and people who overcame her altogether. She saw sights and shows such as she had never dreamed of; she saw a wax figure at the corner, with a fine curled wig, a figure which turned from side to side; she saw sights on every side to please her fancy, to delight her eyes, but only to make her remember afterward that she lived among a lot of dirty people, in two miserable old rooms, in a dirty little street; that she was really happier in the place where she grew first than in the place where she grew last; that made her wonder why she had ever sighed, and sighed, and wished to get a hundred miles away from that precious old mile-stone.
She was not contented in London a bit more than she had been contented playing in the shadow of the steeple and of the mill. She was not contented at all. Had she learned to be contented under the shadow of the mill and the steeple, under the walnut tree, and among the flowers around the mile-stone, she might have smiled brighter smiles in the dark little room in the dirty old house, in the dirty little street in London. A bright, contented flower says the same sweet words in the fresh green fields, and in a little flower pot up in a London window; a contented little flower always wears a bright face. A contented heart is always cheerful.