While Caroline Was Growing

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With a great sweep of her arm, she brushed aside a portièreand disappeared.	[66]
"Sh! sh!" he whispered excitedly, "not a vordt! Not a vordt!Mein Gott! but it is marvellous."	[74]
"What are you doing here, little girl?" he demanded sternly.	[118]
Caroline danced, bowing and posturing in a bewitchedabandon, around the tinkling, glistening fountain.	[274]
Across the court was a lighted room with a long Frenchwindow, and in the center of this window there sat in a high,carved chair a very old woman.	[282]
Caroline was not a hundred yards away, sheltering under aheavy arbor vitæ, flat on her stomach.	[299]

I

AN IDYL OF THE ROAD

aroline rocked herself back and forth from her waist, defying the uncompromisingly straight chair which inclosed her portly little person.

"Bounded 'n th' north by Mass'joosetts; bounded 'n th' north by Mass'joosetts; bounded 'n th' north by Mass'joosetts," she intoned in a monotonous chant. But her eyes were not upon the map; like those of the gentleman in the poem, they were with her heart, and that was far away.

Out of the window the spring was coming on, in waves of tree-bloom and bright grass; the birds bickered sweetly in the sun-patches; everything was reaching on tiptoe for the delicious thrill of May—and she was bounding Connecticut! It was idiotic. What was a knowledge of the uninteresting limits of her native State compared to that soft fresh wind on her cheek, that indescribable odor of brown earth?