'Lewis
Hall,' a roomy frame-house built before the Revolution, was on a hill
which sloped gently toward the corn-fields and meadows that bordered the
lazy river beyond which rose the bluffs of Buckingham. Back of the
house, a level space was laid out in a formal garden. The boxwood,
brought from England when that was the mother country, met across the
turf walks. Long-neglected flowers--damask and cabbage roses, zinnias,
cock's-comb, hollyhocks--grew half-wild, making masses of glowing color.
Along the walks, where there had paced, a hundred years before, stately
Lewis ladies in brocade and stately Lewis gentlemen in velvet coats, now
tripped an orphan girl, a stranger in her father's home. But she was a
very happy little maid as she roamed about the spacious old garden on
that sunshiny summer day, gathering hollyhocks and zinnias for ladies to
occupy her playhouse in the gnarled roots of an old oak-tree.
When Lizzie came out to play, she and Anne wandered away to the fields.
There was a dear little baby brook--how well Anne remembered it!--that
started from a spring on the hillside, trickled among the under-brush,
loitered through the meadow, and emptied into a larger stream that fed
the river.
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