So saying he took off his overalls, seized his hat, and with a parting salute was off down the road, singing his favorite song.  I can give you the words and the time, but alas!  I cannot print Osh Popham’s dauntless spirit and serene content, nor his cheery voice as he travelled with tolerable swiftness to meet his waiting Maria.

  Here comes a maid-en full of woe. 
  Hi-dum-di-dum did-dy-i-o! 
  Here comes a maid-en full of woe. 
  Hi der-ry O! 
  Here comes a maid-en full of woe,
  As full of woe as she can go! 
  Hi dum did-dy i
  O!  Hi der-ry O!

XVIII

THE HOUSE OF LORDS

The Carey children had only found it by accident.  All their errands took them down the main street to the village; to the Popham’s cottage at the foot of a little lane turning towards the river, or on to the post-office and Bill Harmon’s store, or to Colonel Wheeler’s house and then to the railway station.  One afternoon Nancy and Kathleen had walked up the road in search of pastures new, and had spied down in a distant hollow a gloomy grey house almost surrounded by cedars.  A grove of poplars to the left of it only made the prospect more depressing, and if it had not been for a great sheet of water near by, floating with cow lilies and pond lilies, the whole aspect of the place would have been unspeakably dreary.

Nancy asked Mr. Popham who lived in the grey house behind the cedars, and when he told them a certain Mr. Henry Lord, his two children and housekeeper, they fell into the habit of speaking of the place as the House of Lords.

“You won’t never see nothin’ of ’em,” said Mr. Popham.  “Henry Lord ain’t never darkened the village for years, I guess, and the young ones ain’t never been to school so far; they have a teacher out from Portland Tuesdays and Fridays, and the rest o’ the week they study up for him.  Henry’s ’bout as much of a hermit’s if he lived in a hut on a mounting, an’ he’s bringing up the children so they’ll be jest as odd’s he is.”

“Is the mother dead?” Mrs. Carey asked.

“Yes, dead these four years, an’ a good job for her, too.  It’s an awful queer world!  Not that I could make a better one!  I allers say, when folks grumble, ’Now if you was given the materials, could you turn out a better world than this is?  And when it come to that, what if you hed to furnish your own materials, same as the Lord did!  I guess you’d be put to it!’—­Well, as I say, it’s an awful queer world; they clap all the burglars into jail, and the murderers and the wife-beaters (I’ve allers thought a gentle reproof would be enough punishment for a wife-beater, ‘cause he probably has a lot o’ provocation that nobody knows), and the firebugs (can’t think o’ the right name—­something like cendenaries), an’ the breakers o’ the peace, an’ what not; an’ yet the law has nothin’ to say to a man like Hen Lord!  He’s been a college professor, but I went to school with him, darn his picter, an’ I’ll call him Hen whenever I git a chance, though he does declare he’s a doctor.”