The House Without Windows

I

The Meadow

Flowers have faded,
Butterfly wings are weary,
And far off is the charting of the eternal sea.

In a little brown shingled cottage on one of the foothills of Mount Varcrobis, there lived with her father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Eigleen, a little girl named Eepersip. She was rather lonely. She kept advising Mr. and Mrs. Eigleen to make a beautiful garden, where flowers would bloom year after year, and to which birds and butterflies would come back again and again. Accordingly all three set to work with a will, and in a few years they had made the most beautiful garden that was ever seen. Around its borders bloomed apple-trees, pear-trees, and peach-trees, and inside them bloomed azaleas, rhododendrons, magnolias, lilacs, honeysuckle, and fire-blossoms. Next came the ground flowers. There were seven kinds of roses, and there was a whole corner devoted to early spring flowers: crocuses, daffodils, squills, and narcissi. Another corner was carpeted with tender anemones, all snow-white. In the centre of the garden there was a circular bed filled with iris of all kinds and colours. Clematis and morning-glory vines climbed over the wooden benches, and near the centre was a tall arch with ramblers climbing all over it. Another bed was thickly clustered with great purple violets. The paths through the garden had gracefully bending ferns on each side.

For the first few months Eepersip was delighted with her flowers, and the butterflies and birds pleased her even more. But she was not a child who could be contented easily, and pretty soon she began to feel lonely again. One July day a fresh idea came into her head. She packed some sandwiches and some crackers in a small lunch-basket. Without telling a soul, the next morning before dawn she slipped out of bed, dressed, and picked up her basket; then she stole out of the cottage and away. She went east from her home on a shady path through beautiful woodlands, with here and there a grove of great massive pines. And as she walked she sang merrily.