“Mother, isn’t Becky very nice?” said Milly, as they walked away.  “Her mother lets her do such a lot of things—­nurse the baby, and call the cows, and make pinafores.  Oh, I wish father was a farmer.”

“Well, it’s not a bad kind of life when the sun shines, and everything is going right,” said Mrs. Norton; “but I think you had better wait a little bit till the rain comes before you quite make up your mind about it, Milly.”

But Milly was quite sure she knew enough about it already to make up her mind, and all the way home she kept saying to herself, “If I could only turn into a little farmer’s girl!  Why don’t people have fairy godmothers now like Cinderella?”

CHAPTER IV

OUT ON THE HILLS

Milly and Olly, and the four little Westmoreland children, had a very pleasant tea together in the afternoon of the Nortons’s first day at Ravensnest.  Bessie and Charlie certainly didn’t talk much; but Tiza, when once her mother had made her come, thought proper to get rid of a great deal of her shyness, and to chatter and romp so much that they quite fell in love with her, and could not be persuaded to go anywhere or do anything without her.  Nurse would not let Milly and Olly go to call the cows, though she promised they should some other day; but she took the whole party down to the stepping-stones after tea, and great fun it was to see Becky and Tiza running over the stepping-stones, and jumping from one stone to another like little fawns.  Milly and Olly wanted sorely to go too, but there was no persuading Nana to let them go without their father to fish them out if they tumbled in, so they had to content themselves with dangling their legs over the first stepping-stone and watching the others.  But perhaps you don’t quite known what stepping-stones are?  They are large high stones, with flat tops, which people put in, a little way apart from each other, right across a river, so that by stepping from one to the other you can cross to the opposite side.  Of course they only do for little rivers, where the water isn’t very deep.  And they don’t always do even there.  Sometimes in the river Thora, where Milly and Olly’s stepping-stones were, when it rained very much, the water rose so high that it dashed right over the stepping-stones and nobody could go across.  Milly and Olly saw the stepping-stones covered with water once or twice while they were at Ravensnest; but the first evening they saw them the river was very low, and the stones stood up high and dry out of the water.  Milly thought that stepping-stones were much nicer than bridges, and that it was the most amusing and interesting way of getting across a river that she knew.  But then Milly was inclined to think everything wonderful and interesting at Ravensnest—­from the tall mountains that seemed to shut them in all around like a wall, down to the tiny gleaming wild strawberries, that were just beginning to show their