and not a little wisdom; at any rate a direction for which she would all her life be thankful.  It would have been surprising if her presence in the doctor’s house had not after some time made changes in it, but there was no great difference outwardly except that she gathered some trifling possessions which sometimes harmonized, and as often did not, with the household gods of the doctor and Marilla.  There was a shy sort of intercourse between Nan and Mrs. Graham’s grandchildren, but it was not very valuable to any of the young people at first, the country child being too old and full of experience to fellowship with the youngest, and too unversed in the familiar machinery of their social life to feel much kinship with the eldest.

It was during one of these early summer visits, and directly after a tea-party which Marilla had proudly projected on Nan’s account, that Dr. Leslie suddenly announced that he meant to go to Boston for a few days and should take Nan with him.  This event had long been promised, but had seemed at length like the promise of happiness in a future world, reasonably certain, but a little vague and distant.  It was a more important thing than anybody understood, for a dear and familiar chapter of life was ended when the expectant pair drove out of the village on their way to the far-off railway station, as another had been closed when the door of the Thacher farm-house had been shut and padlocked, and Nan had gone home one snowy night to live with the doctor.  The weather at any rate was different now, for it was early June, the time when doctors can best give themselves a holiday; and though Dr. Leslie assured himself that he had little wish to take the journey, he felt it quite due to his ward that she should see a little more of the world, and happily due also to certain patients and his brother physicians that he should visit the instrument-makers’ shops, and some bookstores; in fact there were a good many important errands to which it was just as well to attend in person.  But he watched Nan’s wide-open, delighted eyes, and observed her lack of surprise at strange sights, and her perfect readiness for the marvelous, with great amusement.  He was touched and pleased because she cared most for what had concerned him; to be told where he lived and studied, and to see the places he had known best, roused most enthusiasm.  An afternoon in a corner of the reading-room at the Athenaeum library, in which he had spent delightful hours when he was a young man, seemed to please the young girl more than anything else.  As he sat beside the table where he had gathered enough books and papers to last for many days, in his delight at taking up again his once familiar habit, Nan looked on with sympathetic eyes, or watched the squirrels in the trees of the quiet Granary Burying Ground, which seemed to her like a bit of country which the noisy city had caught and imprisoned.  Now that she was fairly out in the world she felt a new, strange