by the elder members of the family.  One can imagine how the young creature had planned it in the spring, and persuaded the men to plough and harrow it, and since then had stoutly done all the work herself, and meant to send the harvest of the piece to market, and pocket her honest gains, as they came in, for some great end.  She was as thin as a grasshopper, this busy little gardener, and hardly turned to give us a glance, as we drove slowly up the hill close by.  The sun will brown and dry her like a spear of grass on that hot slope, but a spark of fine spirit is in the small body, and I wish her a famous crop.  I hate to say that the piece looked backward, all except the sage, and that it was a heavy bit of land for the clumsy hoe to pick at.  The only puzzle is, what she proposes to do with so long a row of sage.  Yet there may be a large family with a downfall of measles yet ahead, and she does not mean to be caught without sage-tea.

Along this road every one of the old farmhouses has at least one tall bush of white roses by the door,—­a most lovely sight, with buds and blossoms, and unvexed green leaves.  I wish that I knew the history of them, and whence the first bush was brought.  Perhaps from England itself, like a red rose that I know in Kittery, and the new shoots from the root were given to one neighbor after another all through the district.  The bushes are slender, but they grow tall without climbing against the wall, and sway to and fro in the wind with a grace of youth and an inexpressible charm of beauty.  How many lovers must have picked them on Sunday evenings, in all the bygone years, and carried them along the roads or by the pasture footpaths, hiding them clumsily under their Sunday coats if they caught sight of any one coming.  Here, too, where the sea wind nips many a young life before its prime, how often the white roses have been put into paler hands, and withered there!

In spite of the serene and placid look of the old houses, one who has always known them cannot help thinking of the sorrows of these farms and their almost undiverted toil.  Near the little gardener’s plot, we turned from the main road and drove through lately cleared woodland up to an old farmhouse, high on a ledgy hill, whence there is a fine view of the country seaward and mountainward.  There were few of the once large household left there:  only the old farmer, who was crippled by war wounds, active, cheerful man that he was once, and two young orphan children.  There has been much hard work spent on the place.  Every generation has toiled from youth to age without being able to make much beyond a living.  The dollars that can be saved are but few, and sickness and death have often brought their bitter cost.  The mistress of the farm was helpless for many years; through all the summers and winters she sat in her pillowed rocking-chair in the plain room.  She could watch the seldom-visited lane, and beyond it, a little way across the fields, were