"Ah! I can remember, still longer ago, when you were very little, and Henry almost a baby," said Lucy, "papa carrying us over the field there to nurse's, and getting flowers for us."
"I should like," she added, "to live in this place, and all of us together, just as we are now, a hundred years."
"I feel we shall never come back if we go away," said Emily.
"We shall never come back and be what we have been," replied Lucy; "that time is gone, I know. This is our last summer in this happy place. Oh, if I had known it when we were reading Henry's story at the hut, how very sad I should have been!"
"I cannot help crying," said Emily; "and I must not cry before our poor grandmamma."
"These things which are happening," said Lucy, "make me think of what mamma has often said, that it seldom
happens that many years pass without troubles and changes. I never could understand them before, but I do now."
"Because," added Emily, "we have lived such a very, very long time just in the same way."
The two little girls sat talking until they both became more calm; but they had left off talking of their own feelings some time before they left the hill, and began to speak of their grandmother; and they tried to put away their own little griefs, as far as they could, that they might comfort her. With these good thoughts in their minds, they came down the hill and returned to the house.