for her).  They were delighted with the purse—­which I ought to mention was finished with some white beads; we found them in rummaging among our boxes, and they made beautiful rings and tassels, contrasting charmingly with the blue and red of the rest of the purse.  The doctor and his little girl were, as I have said, delighted with the present; and they gave Emily, in return, a workbox for herself, and a box of sugar-plums for her baby sister.  The child came back all flushed with the pleasure of the visit, and quite helped to keep up her father’s spirits with talking to him about it.  So much for the highly interesting history of the bead purse.

Toward the afternoon the light cart from the farmhouse came to fetch us and our things to Appletreewick.  It was quite a warm spring day, and I had another pang to bear as I saw poor William helped into the cart, looking so sickly and sad, with his miserable green shade, in the cheerful sunlight.  “God only knows, Leah, how this will succeed with us,” he said, as we started; then sighed, and fell silent again.

Just outside the town the doctor met us.  “Good luck go with you!” he cried, swinging his stick in his usual hasty way; “I shall come and see you as soon as you are all settled at the farmhouse.”  “Good-by, sir,” says Emily, struggling up with all her might among the bundles in the bottom of the cart; “good-by, and thank you again for the work-box and the sugar-plums.”  That was my child all over! she never wants telling.  The doctor kissed his hand, and gave another flourish with his stick.  So we parted.

How I should have enjoyed the drive if William could only have looked, as I did, at the young firs on the heath bending beneath the steady breeze; at the shadows flying over the smooth fields; at the high white clouds moving on and on, in their grand airy procession over the gladsome blue sky!  It was a hilly road, and I begged the lad who drove us not to press the horse; so we were nearly an hour, at our slow rate of going, before we drew up at the gate of Appletreewick.

24th February to 2d March.—­We have now been here long enough to know something of the place and the people.  First, as to the place:  Where the farmhouse now is, there was once a famous priory.  The tower is still standing, and the great room where the monks ate and drank—­used at present as a granary.  The house itself seems to have been tacked on to the ruins anyhow.  No two rooms in it are on the same level.  The children do nothing but tumble about the passages, because there always happens to be a step up or down, just at the darkest part of every one of them.  As for staircases, there seems to me to be one for each bedroom.  I do nothing but lose my way—­and the farmer says, drolling, that he must have sign-posts put up for me in every corner of the house from top to bottom.  On the ground-floor, besides the usual domestic offices, we have the best parlor—­a dark, airless, expensively furnished solitude, never