THE two little girls received an invitation from a farmer’s wife, who lived in a valley not very far off, to come and see the first cider made.
‘May we go, dear grandmamma, may we go?’ said Alice and Beatrice; ‘we shall like it so much!’
‘I want very much to know how cider is made,’ said Alice.
‘Then you must try and learn all about it to-morrow; and what you do not understand, you must ask Mrs. Laurence to tell you.’
The children were very impatient for to-morrow, and were delighted the next morning to see that it was a fine and sunny day, and very warm.
After their early dinner, the two little girls went with Mary over a low part of the hill, and down a steep road into the valley where Mrs. Laurence lived, who was very glad to see them.
Mrs. Laurence took the children first into her kitchen, a large room where a good fire was burning, although it was so warm out of doors. Mary took off their cloaks, and put them down on a chair in the corner; and Mrs. Laurence took the little girls out of another door, and they walked through her nice little garden, which had a number of beautiful rose trees in full bloom. The farmer’s wife told Alice and Beatrice that her boys liked to keep the garden in order after they had done their farm work, and that they had budded all these roses, and she was very proud of her flowers.
When they came to the large open yard at the back of the house, they saw a number of geese come flying down the hill that rose up all round the yard; and the children stopped to see the geese come one after another with a great noise, and the sound they made with their wings was very loud and very strange; and they asked why it was.
‘It is because the geese are so very heavy, and do not fly much—only now and then, when they want to come quickly to some place,’ said Mrs. Laurence.
‘It is a sign of stormy weather coming,’ said Ellen, Mrs. Laurence’s eldest girl, ‘when the geese fly about and scream so: is it not, mother?’