A Letter from Germany
"I sent him a snap shot of the family."
"Nancy! What for?"
"So that he could see what we were like; so that he'd know we were fit to be lifelong tenants!"
Mrs. Carey turned resignedly to the letter again.
From the dear mother who sits in the centre, to the lovable little Peter who looks as if he were all that you describe him! I was about his age when I went to the Yellow House to spend a few years. Old Granny Hamilton had lived there all her life, and when my mother, who was a widow, was seized with a serious illness she took me home with her for a long visit. She was never well enough to go away, so my early childhood was passed in Beulah, and I only left the village when I was ten years old, and an orphan.
"Oh, dear!" interpolated Nancy. "It seems, lately, as if nobody had both father and mother!"
Granny Hamilton died soon after my mother, and I hardly know who lived in the house for the next thirty years. It was my brother's property, and a succession of families occupied it until it fell to me in my turn. I have no happy memories connected with it, so you can go ahead and make them for yourselves. My only remembrance is of the west bedroom, where my mother lived and died.
"The west bedroom; that is n't the painted one; no, of course it is the one where I sleep,"
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