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A Lost Lady
A Lost Lady
A Lost Lady
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A Lost Lady

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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Marian Forrester arrives in the prairie town of Sweet Water as a young bride — beautiful, aristocratic, and spirited. To Captain Daniel Forrester, her pioneer husband, she's a precious jewel, and in the eyes of her new neighbor, young Niel Herbert, she's the perfect lady. But like the burgeoning promise of the American frontier, Marian's charms decline with the passing of time, and the world's admiration curdles into pity and contempt.
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Willa Cather looked back from the perspective of the modern industrial world to an era when the American frontier offered an abundance of fresh possibilities. The country's inevitable change is reflected in this bittersweet coming-of-age story, whose themes explore the passing of a proud pioneer spirit, the triumph of materialism, and the struggles of women in a patriarchal society. A Lost Lady brilliantly recaptures a specific chapter in American history and its evocation of loss and nostalgia remains recognizable to readers of every time and place.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 20, 2019
ISBN9780486838946
A Lost Lady
Author

Willa Cather

Willa Cather was an American novelist who wrote tales of the Great Plains and stories of immigrant and migrant families who settled the American West. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her book "One of Ours," which explored romantic idealism, the frustrations of life in middle America and how World War I profoundly changed the lives of the young men who fought in the conflict. It was published in 1923.Cather was born in Virginia, but her family relocated to Nebraska when Willa was nine years old. They settled in the town of Red Cloud, where her father initially attempted to become a farmer, but eventually moved into the real estate and insurance business. Willa attended school for the first time after the family arrived in Nebraska.Eventually, she would graduate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and spend ten years in Pittsburgh, working as a teacher and a magazine editor at Home Monthly, often contributing her own stories and poems to the publication. After working at the Pittsburgh Leader, Cather moved to New York and began working as an editor at McClure's Magazine where she also contributed stories. They would eventually serialize her first novel, "Alexander's Bridge" in 1912.Cather followed up her first book with what would become known as the "Prairie Trilogy": "O Pioneers!" (1913), "Song of the Lark" (1915) and "My Antonia" 1918. By this time, Cather had firmly established herself as a writer and her Pulitzer for "One of Ours" would forever cement her as a major figure in American literature. Her follow-up, "Death Comes for the Archbishop" (1927) would be cited as one of Modern Library's Best 100 Novels of the 20th century.She lived with her domestic partner, Edith Lewis, for 39 years before developing breast cancer and dying of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1947. She is buried beside Lewis in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

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Rating: 3.7406780233898305 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A very short, very well written timeless novel.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A Lost Lady is about Mrs. Forrester the wife of a railroad man (Captain Forrester) who lives in a small town upon the railroad line always at the ready to greet guests which her husband bring home, or to make sure the local boys who play in the fields or fish in the creek near her house are always welcome. Told through the narrative of Neil Herbert, the nephew of a local judge and Captain Forrester’s lawyer.The novel shows how as he grows up he learns more about Mrs. Forrester and she becomes less like the model wife he had thought her when he was a young child. Although, she stays with the captain until his very end, even through the threat of losing their beloved home and after he has a stroke and must not travel anymore.Each time Neil found out something more which caused him to lose his love of the Mrs. Forrester he had grown up with my heart grieved. He might have been a tad naive rowing up, but there are some things which need to stay in the dark and for him to have to find out about these things is saddening. It is akin to finding out dark secrets about your own parents and then not being able to tell anyone.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I love this book for its insights into human nature. Niel finds that Marian Forrester is not faithful to the trustworthy and admirable Captain and yet she is ultimately charming and irresistible. She does what she must to survive.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    prose is wonderful. couldn't quite get into the Mme Bovary on the frontier story nor the mourning for the Pioneer era & its titans.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A Lost Lady shares a similar narrative device as Cather's My Antonia -- a young man who has gone East for his education reminisces about a woman he was in love with as a child growing up in the frontier Mid West. The women are different -- Antonia is a farm girl, Mrs. Forrester is a polished lady -- but Cather evokes the same feeling of nostalgia.Cather's direct, spare language is perfect for the setting. She draws a nuanced portrait of a Niel, a sensitive young man, a little out of place among his peers and drawn to the fine manners and beauty of Mrs. Forrester. The reader discovers Mrs. Forrester through the Niel's own realization of her character. This little novella is the perfect thing to take on your next short flight. Cather's calm, straightforward prose is the perfect way to tune out a plane full of screaming toddlers -- "The room was cool and dusky and quiet.... The windows went almost down to the baseboard, like doors, and the closed green shutters let in streaks of sunlight that quivered on the polished floor and the silver things on the dresser. The heavy curtains were looped back with thick cords, like ropes. The marble-topped washstand was as big as a sideboard. The massive walnut furniture was all inlaid with pale-coloured woods."
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Captain Daniel Forrester and his younger wife, Marian, live in a prairie town with tight connections to the Burlington railway. Mrs. Forrester maintains a distant relationship with most people, but her charm and good looks still have them eating out of her hand. Early in the story, Mrs. Forrester gives a group of schoolboys permission to play on her property, and she brings them food. One of the boys, Niel, develops a crush on her and Mrs. Forrester's story is then told largely through his eyes.Niel is a studious young man, reading classics and working to overcome his humble origins. Captain Forrester, a self-made man, counsels Niel that he need only work hard to get what he deserves in life:All our great west has been developed from such dreams; the homesteader's and the prospector's and the contractor's. We dreamed the railroads across the mountains, just as I dreamed my place on the Sweet Water. (p. 55)As Niel matures he watches the Forresters, and pines for Mrs. Forrester who of course sees him as nothing more than a nice schoolboy. Niel's illusions are shattered when Mrs. Forrester shows her own human weaknesses. Unfortunately, I failed to develop an emotional connection to these characters. The novel was improved by Cather's beautiful descriptions of the landscape:The sky was burning with the soft p[ink and silver of a cloudless summer dawn. The heavy, bowed grasses splashed him to the knees. All over the marsh, snow-on-the-mountain, globed with dew, made cool sheets of silver, and the swamp milk-week spread its flat, raspberry-coloured clusters. There was an almost religious purity about the fresh morning air, the tender sky, the grass and flowers with the sheen of early dew upon them. There was in all living things something limpid and joyous -- like the wet, morning call of the birds, flying up through the unstained atmosphere. (p. 84)This was a decent novel, just not one of Cather's best.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The lost lady of Willa Cather’s novella is Marian Forrester, wife to Captain Forrester who of late was instrumental in the building of the railway. She is the very breath of light and spring to many a young boy in Sweet Water. In particular, Niel Herbert falls under Mrs. Forrester’s spell as a boy when she tends him after he has fallen and broken his arm. But her charms captivate one and all, not least the Captain’s many powerful friends. Yet hers is a free spirit and, in some senses, even from the outset she is already a lost lady. However, her losses only become apparent years later after the Captain first loses his fortune and then, following a stroke, much of his mobility. His infirmity traps her in Sweet Water, preventing her from joining with her friends in Colorado for the winters. And that is when Niel begins to really notice her changing.Along with a vividly painted portrait of a woman very much of her own mind, this story treads through both the beautiful meadows and the marshy backwater of the American hinterland. Early in the story we witness perhaps the most awful example of wanton cruelty I have ever encountered in a story. It is so startling that it makes it hard to even focus on what Cather is doing here. But I suppose that, since nothing much comes of that act at the time or later, it must be meant to serve as a caution on how we ought to treat of Marian’s own actions. Fate, it seems, can be as cruel as the cruelest of young boys.Cather’s writing is never less than riveting. She seems to evoke a prairie locale with the mere wave of her hand, but it is surely the work of a great artist. Her central characters are as complex as any imaginable: full of contrary actions, missteps, magnanimity, and baseness. Almost too much for such a slight work. But gently recommended, as ever.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An elegantly written novella set in the mid-west of the USA. A young woman is married to a much older man and her life and her loves and deceits are observed by a boy and later young man who is besotted by her and though he becomes aware of her faults and folies never loses his affection for her.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Love Cather's writing, her characters, her quiet way.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A compelling and intriguing story with well developed characters and setting. Like other Cathers well worth the reading effort.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was my first foray into Willa Cather's writing and I found this a thoughtful and engaging novel that works on several levels. It is a character study of a woman at a time of change in the American west; a character study of America at the time of the railroad boom as it evolves alongside changing ideas of morality and social convention; a study of a complex web of relationships: friendship, love, loyalty rooted in respect, gratitude or feudal class-based tradition. I was left under no illusions, Cather was obviously a supporter of the old ways.Mrs Forrester, the 'Lost Lady' of the title is married to an ageing Captain in a small, backwoods town in the transitional America of the railroad era. This work deals with her complex relationship with her husband, her lovers and a youth of the town, Neils, who idolises the image of her and reveres her husband and his old fashioned morals and conventions. The new, crude manners of the upcoming generation contrasts with Neils' old-school outlook. Cather shows him as outdated, left behind by his compatriots. As you follow this trio of characters through to the death of the Captain, we see Neils' polarised idea of right and wrong in the light of the complexities of the emotional and moral ties that bind the other characters. Ultimately, Neils' innocence dies with Captain Forrester as his illusions are shattered by the realisation that all live with some kind or moral compromise and none of his idols fit into his succinct categories of morality. As for the 'Lady' herself, on the one hand, the reader is tempted to dislike her for her perceived disloyalty. However, ultimately it becomes clear that, in her own way, she was as loyal to her husband as others and that loyalty and faithfulness are not necessarily synonymous and in some ways this redeems her.It is an interesting and beautifully crafted novel and the characterisation is very competently realised. Criticism has been levelled at Cather's work, implying that she was over-reliant on her devotion to the old America of a time that was passing and that she refused to accept the newer world; that she was wasting her obvious talent by not turning it loose on the modern world. However, for me, it is exactly this viewpoint that makes the novel so poignant. I would certainly recommend this. It is a very engaging and fast read but definitely a pleasureable one too.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A toast--Happy Days! / The wild roses of summer / Their bloom, quick to fade.In A Lost Lady, Willa Cather presents the complementary side of prairie life to the "homesteaders and hand-workers" who populate O Pioneers! and My Antonia. This is the story of "the bankers and gentlemen ranchers who came from the Atlantic seaboard to invest money and to 'develop our great West.'" Especially one such banker, Captain Daniel Forrester, who lived in the prairie town of Sweet Water with his young, beautiful, charming wife, the former Marian Ormsby.Captain Forrester made his fortune building the railroad and many railroad VIPs made a point of stopping at "the Forrester place" on their business trips back and forth on the railway. In those "happy days" Mrs. Marian Forrester presided over this remote outpost of Denver and San Francisco society. It was the image of Mrs. Forrester as the perfect wife and hostess that captivated Niel Herbert, a boy growing up in Sweet Water. But bank failure and crop failure turned Sweet Water into "one of those grey towns along the Burlington railroad" and drained the fortune of Captain Forrester. The VIP visits grew fewer and fewer.Neil is another of Cather's emasculated male characters and it is through his eyes that we see the decline of Mrs. Forrester. Unfaithful as wife, a clandestine affair with the notorious Frank Ellenger. Abandoned by Ellenger, a drunken telephone call to him overheard by the town gossip. Putting her business affairs in the hands of the shylock, Ivy Peters. Later allowing those hands familiar access to her person. Niel is first appalled and ultimately contemptuous of his fallen goddess. His judgment: "she was not willing to immolate herself . . . she preferred life on any terms."Of course she preferred life--she was a survivor, as much as Alexandra and Antonia were survivors. At age 19 she survived the murder of her millionaire fiance and the ensuing scandal; the fall off a mountain cliff that killed her guide; the isolated life of a prairie town with no indigenous social peers. She did what she had to do, suffered what she must. Her talent was not tilling the earth, but tilling society. She had a charm that brought admirers from across the country, and when those admirers no longer came to Sweet Water, she knew she had to go to them. She mortgaged herself to Ivy Peters until she had the means to leave. She did leave then, found another millionaire and lived out her life in her own grand style. She remained true to herself, if not always to others. She was a lost lady only to the jejune Niel Herbert.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Recently reread this classic by Cather. She's a wonderful writer, but I didn't like this as much the second time around.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is, although less known, one of Cather's masterworks. I read too long ago to justice to it in a review. I remember it as a compelling and unflinching survey of a woman determined to live life onher own terms, one who is both admirable and tragic
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Beautifully crafted short novel which takes the notion of "coming of age" far beyond the personal, yet grounds it in skillfully nuanced portraits of the characters.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Cather’s writing is beautiful and this short novel gives just enough of the tragic Marian Forrester to pull the reader in. She’s married to an older man who has been badly injured. The story is told from the point of view of Niel, a young man who fell in love with her. She has become little more than a caregiver for her husband and then she takes a lover. Apparently, her character partly inspired Daisy’s in The Great Gatsby. The book includes one of the most disturbing scenes of animal cruelty I’ve ever read, which almost put me off it completely. I’m glad I read it, so I could gain a deeper appreciation for Cather’s skill. It reminded me a bit of Madame Bovary and of The Angle of Repose.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I found this a melancholy book. Mrs. Forrester, though a lovely lady to Niel and all of Mr. Forrester's friends, is indeed lost. She is impatient with social conventions and she drinks, at times too much, and is probably unfaithful to her husband, none of which matter when things are going well but are enough to tip the scales against her when they aren't. The scene early in the book with Ivy Peters and the woodpecker is shocking. I kept thinking that even in 1923 there were psychopaths! This event, unknown to the Forresters, colors both Niel and the reader's view of later events involving Mrs. Forrester's connections with Ivy Peters.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This novella is barely more than a character sketch. The brilliance of Cather’s prose is demonstrated in her portrayal of Marian Forrester, the high-spirited wife of one of the great pioneers and railroad builders. There are also historical implications of Cather’s fable. These are enhanced by the enigmatic and ambiguous elements in Mrs. Forrester’s portrait. On the surface, Marian Forrester belongs to Cather’s long line of restless, magnetic, intelligent women, like Alexandra Bergson, who grows wealthy farming the virgin land in O Pioneers! (1913), Thea Kronborg, the Swedish girl who becomes a famous opera singer in The Song of the Lark (1915), and Ãntonia Shimerda, the heroine of My Ãntonia (1918), who survives tragedy and abandonment to become the mother of many children, “a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”One may view A Lost Lady as a brilliant epilogue to Cather’s famous pioneer novels; however, it has a different tone, not heroic and optimistic like the Whitmanesque O Pioneers! but bittersweet and retrospective like Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. As one who loves Cather's beautiful writing style I found this a touching taste from her pen.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Thirty or forty years ago, in one of those grey towns along the Burlington railroad, which are so much greyer today than they were then, there was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.Mm. I knew from the very first sentence that I was going to enjoy this book. Cather’s writing is a delight throughout. Her prose is simple, direct, elegant, evocative.I went into the book knowing next to nothing about it—something I rarely do—and found that made for an extremely freeing experience. The story takes place near the end of America’s great push west, as the old pioneers are gradually giving way to a generation of young men who take life on the Great Plains for granted. This is a subject about which Cather was very passionate, and on which she touches numerous times over the course of the novella, but her scope here is much narrower than that. Mostly, A Lost Lady is a character study. It is an examination of one Marian Forrester, the young wife of one of those old pioneers, as seen through the eyes of young Niel Herbert.Cather, to say the least, does an eerily good job of writing from a young man’s point of view. Few female authors have captured the male psyche this well. (Daphne du Maurier, in My Cousin Rachel, is the only name that comes to mind at the moment.) I personally saw quite a lot of myself in him.But it is not Niel, finally, that this story is about. When I was halfway through the book, I told my grandmother I was reading it. Her comment was, “Oh, that Mrs. Forester, she’s such a … nice lady, isn’t she?”I was shocked. “Nice” is not exactly the word I would use to describe the old railway man’s wife. Fickle, manipulative, shallow, false? Yes. Strong, independent, charming, loyal? Yes, all those as well. She is a tremendously complex character, the kind one cannot exactly put one’s finger on. And those are, of course, the very best kind.I cannot say I was wowed by A Lost Lady, but then, I don’t think that was Cather’s intention. It is a book of modest pretensions, beautifully executed. Because of the quality of the writing, and the fact that it is a s short and easy read, this gets a solid recommendation from me; Cather, meanwhile, has moved to the top of my list of American authors whose works I wish to explore.

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A Lost Lady by Willa Cather; (3*); VMC; purgedA Lost Lady is titled very nicely. It is about the deterioration of a woman who goes from being principled, dignified and well respected to becoming a lady who is adulterous, financially unscrupulous, and disrespected. The lady Marian Forrester is a well constructed character, as are the main male character, Niel Herbert, and the novel's villain (ish, Ivy Peters. This slim novel is filled with subtlety and nuances but somehow it lacks the energy of O Pioneers and My Antonia which are novels that Cather seemed to really put her heart into. This is still a good novel, just not her best and I've always read Cather at her best. In fact I did not realize that she had anything out there that was not 'her best'.

Book preview

A Lost Lady - Willa Cather

LADY

PART ONE

1

THIRTY OR FORTY YEARS AGO, in one of those grey towns along the Burlington railroad, which are so much greyer today than they were then, there was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere. Well known, that is to say, to the railroad aristocracy of that time; men who had to do with the railroad itself, or with one of the land companies which were its by-products. In those days it was enough to say of a man that he was connected with the Burlington. There were the directors, the general managers, vice-presidents, superintendents, whose names we all knew; and their younger brothers or nephews were auditors, freight agents, departmental assistants. Everyone connected with the Road, even the large cattle- and grain-shippers, had annual passes; they and their families rode about over the line a great deal. There were then two distinct social strata in the prairie States; the homesteaders and hand-workers who were there to make a living, and the bankers and gentlemen ranchers who came from the Atlantic seaboard to invest money and to develop our great West, as they used to tell us.

When the Burlington men were travelling back and forth on business not very urgent, they found it agreeable to drop off the express and spend a night in a pleasant house where their importance was delicately recognized; and no house was pleasanter than that of Captain Daniel Forrester, at Sweet Water. Captain Forrester was himself a railroad man, a contractor, who had built hundreds of miles of road for the Burlington—over the sage brush and cattle country, and on up into the Black Hills.

The Forrester place, as every one called it, was not at all remarkable; the people who lived there made it seem much larger and finer than it was. The house stood on a low round hill, nearly a mile east of town; a white house with a wing, and sharp-sloping roofs to shed the snow. It was encircled by porches, too narrow for modern notions of comfort, supported by the fussy, fragile pillars of that time, when every honest stick of timber was tortured by the turning-lathe into something hideous. Stripped of its vines and denuded of its shrubbery, the house would probably have been ugly enough. It stood close into a fine cottonwood grove that threw sheltering arms to left and right and grew all down the hillside behind it. Thus placed on the hill, against its bristling grove, it was the first thing one saw on coming into Sweet Water by rail, and the last thing one saw on departing.

To approach Captain Forrester’s property, you had first to get over a wide, sandy creek which flowed along the eastern edge of the town. Crossing this by the foot-bridge or the ford, you entered the Captain’s private lane, bordered by Lombardy poplars, with wide meadows lying on either side. Just at the foot of the hill on which the house sat, one crossed a second creek by the stout wooden road-bridge. This stream traced artless loops and curves through the broad meadows that were half pasture land, half marsh. Any one but Captain Forrester would have drained the bottom land and made it into highly productive fields. But he had selected this place long ago because it looked beautiful to him, and he happened to like the way the creek wound through his pasture, with mint and joint-grass and twinkling willows along its banks. He was well off for those times, and he had no children. He could afford to humour his fancies.

When the Captain drove friends from Omaha or Denver over from the station in his democrat wagon, it gratified him to hear these gentlemen admire his fine stock, grazing in the meadows on either side of his lane. And when they reached the top of the hill, it gratified him to see men who were older than himself leap nimbly to the ground and run up the front steps as Mrs. Forrester came out on the porch to greet them. Even the hardest and coldest of his friends, a certain narrow-faced Lincoln banker, became animated when he took her hand, tried to meet the gay challenge in her eyes and to reply cleverly to the droll word of greeting on her lips.

She was always there, just outside the front door, to welcome their visitors, having been warned of their approach by the sound of hoofs and the rumble of wheels on the wooden bridge. If she happened to be in the kitchen, helping her Bohemian cook, she came out in her apron, waving a buttery iron spoon, or shook cherry-stained fingers at the new arrival. She never stopped to pin up a lock; she was attractive in dishabille, and she knew it. She had been known to rush to the door in her dressing-gown, brush in hand and her long black hair rippling over her shoulders, to welcome Cyrus Dalzell, president of the Colorado & Utah; and that great man had never felt more flattered. In his eyes, and in the eyes of the admiring middle-aged men who visited there, whatever Mrs. Forrester chose to do was lady-like because she did it. They could not imagine her in any dress or situation in which she would not be charming. Captain Forrester himself, a man of few words, told Judge Pommeroy that he had never seen her look more captivating than on the day when she was chased by the new bull in the pasture. She had forgotten about the bull and gone into the meadow to gather wild flowers. He heard her scream, and as he ran puffing down the hill, she was scudding along the edge of the marshes like a hare, beside herself with laughter, and stubbornly clinging to the crimson parasol that had made all the trouble.

Mrs. Forrester was twenty-five years younger than her husband, and she was his second wife. He married her in California and brought her to Sweet Water a bride. They called the place home even then, when they lived there but a few months out of each year. But later, after the Captain’s terrible fall with his horse in the mountains, which broke him so that he could no longer build railroads, he and his wife retired to the house on the hill. He grew old there—and even she, alas! grew older.

2

BUT WE WILL BEGIN this story with a summer morning long ago, when Mrs. Forrester was still a young woman, and Sweet Water was a town of which great things were expected. That morning she was standing in the deep bay-window of her parlour, arranging old-fashioned blush roses in a glass bowl. Glancing up, she saw a group of little boys coming along the driveway, barefoot, with fishing-poles and lunch-baskets. She knew most of them; there was Niel Herbert, Judge Pommeroy’s nephew, a handsome boy of twelve whom she liked; and polite George Adams, son of a gentleman rancher from Lowell, Massachusetts. The others were just little boys from the town; the butcher’s red-headed son, the leading grocer’s fat brown twins, Ed Elliott (whose flirtatious old father kept a shoe store and was the Don Juan of the lower world of Sweet Water), and the two sons of the German tailor—pale, freckled lads with ragged clothes and ragged rust-coloured hair, from whom she sometimes bought game or catfish when they appeared silent and spook-like at her kitchen door and thinly asked if she would care for any fish this morning.

As the boys came up the hill she saw them hesitate and consult together. You ask her, Niel.

You’d better, George. She goes to your house all the time, and she barely knows me to speak to.

As they paused before the three steps which led up to the front porch, Mrs. Forrester came to the door and nodded graciously, one of the pink roses in her hand.

Good-morning, boys. Off for a picnic?

George Adams stepped forward and solemnly took off his big straw hat. Good-morning, Mrs. Forrester. Please may we fish and wade down in the marsh and have our lunch in the grove?

Certainly. You have a lovely day. How long has school been out? Don’t you miss it? I’m sure Niel does. Judge Pommeroy tells me he’s very studious.

The boys laughed, and Niel looked unhappy.

Run along, and be sure you don’t leave the gate into the pasture open. Mr. Forrester hates to have the cattle get in on his blue grass.

The boys went quietly round the house to the gate into the grove, then ran shouting down the grassy slopes under the tall trees. Mrs. Forrester watched them from the kitchen window until they disappeared behind the roll of the hill. She turned to her Bohemian cook.

Mary, when you are baking this morning, put in a pan of cookies for those boys. I’ll take them down when they are having their lunch.

The round hill on which the Forrester house stood sloped gently down to the bridge in front, and gently down through the grove behind. But east of the house, where the grove ended, it broke steeply from high grassy banks, like bluffs, to the marsh below. It was thither the boys were bound.

When lunch time came they had done none of the things they meant to do. They had behaved like wild creatures all morning; shouting from the breezy bluffs, dashing down into the silvery marsh through the dewy cobwebs that glistened on the tall weeds, swishing among the pale tan cattails, wading in the sandy creek bed, chasing a striped water snake from the old willow stump where he was sunning himself, cutting sling-shot crotches, throwing themselves on their stomachs to drink at the cool spring that flowed out from under a bank into a thatch of dark watercress. Only the two German boys, Rheinhold and Adolph Blum, withdrew to a still pool where the creek was dammed by a reclining tree trunk, and, in spite of all the noise and splashing about them, managed to catch a few suckers.

The wild roses were wide open and brilliant, the blue-eyed grass was in purple flower,

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