Time went by slowly, slowly, as it does when one is young. All day there was play, except for the occasional stint of patchwork, or the reading lesson,—every day but Sunday, with its church in the forenoon and stories and walks in the afternoon. Mamma would say, “When I was a little girl in Maine,” until to me Maine meant Paradise. In that country there was a brook where one could wade, and the great river, on whose banks in the woods children could picnic and hunt for wild berries,—what a charm in the words, “going berrying!” Even the nest of angry hornets with their sharp stings did not lessen my enthusiasm. At San Justo there were no Martha and Susan, no Julia and Ella for me to play with,—just boys, (who seemed to answer very well for little tom-boy Sallie when Maine was not in mind).
When I heard of snow and sleighs and sleds and the wonderful attic with its cunning low curtained windows and the doll colony who lived there, I forgot the charms of the ranch and the boy play. It was nothing to me that there were horses and cows, ducks, geese and chickens. It was nothing to me that Dick and I could make figure-four traps, and, walking beyond the wool-barn, set them on the hillside for quail; that once we had the excitement of finding our trap upset, our captives gone, and great bear tracks all about. The long sunny days of freedom with the boys, the great herds of sheep that came up for shearing, the many rides with my father through the lovely valleys and over the hills were commonplace, just what I had always known. No, life in California was very tame compared with the imagined joys of Maine.
