THE next morning, Louie's mind was much quieter; each new day presented so many new things to be seen, and done, and heard, that Louie almost forgot the cloud which on Saturday night had cast such a cold, dark shadow over her heart. She almost forgot, but not quite; Love, that had sent the shadow, would not allow her quite to forget it; still, before the end of the week it had grown to be a very dim remembrance, for a week seemed then a very long time to Louie, and each of its days brought a good deal of business even to her. For besides looking out from the nursery window and watching the gardener at his work, Louie had her own to do; it was not very hard work, but, as she was a very little girl, it needed all her attention to get through it happily.
Louie's first business was to repeat a verse of scripture every morning, and with the verse she had to say the day of the week, the day of the month, and the date of the year; then she had to read a few verses of the Psalms out of a great book with a red leather cover. This was such a large book that, when the verse she was reading happened to be at the top of the page, it was quite a stretch for her little arm to reach it, so that her finger might point the way along the line and thus do its best to prevent her eyes from losing their way among the forest of words that filled the large, square page. The finger was a very patient little servant to the eyes, and would have guided them willingly and safely, line by line, all down the page; but the eyes, I am sorry to say, did not always make the grateful return which would have been becoming on their part. Sometimes the finger and the lips too were kept waiting while those eyes took a journey all round the room, or even a peep into the garden, but as these journeys were only accidental, and not Louie's intention, she generally recalled the eyes before they had been gone very long, and so the reading was got through. Then the hands and eyes did service again, in filling her slate with o's or little words; it needed very close looking to make every letter stand in its place along the line, and to join every o so neatly that the place where it ended could not be seen. If the hand tried to get on without the eyes, the result was soon seen in an o looking like a piece of bent wire, or like something which had been broken and tied together again with an untidy bit of string; not at all like the neat and beautifully rounded letters which were put as copies at the top of the slate. But sometimes Louie forgot all this, and would let her eyes wander out through the long window, down the lawn, over the hedge, the road, the fields on the other side, even across the wide river, to the blue hills which could be seen in the distance.
Those blue hills were so wonderful to Louie! all the hills near Marine Villa were green; and sometimes, when Louie was quite tired of getting through the slate full of o's, she would wait quite a long time thinking about the blue hills, and wondering if anybody lived in so lovely a place, and wishing that she had wings like a little bird, so that she might just fly over and see the wonderful people who lived among those wonderful hills, and find out something about the wonderful things they must do there.
Plenty of people had been and still went, every day, though not on wings but in steamboats, to those blue hills which were the hills of Wales, and which, though Louie did not know it, were just as green as the hills on her side of the water; and where, if she could have gone over to look, she would have found other little girls, very like herself, sitting up, just as she was, in the midst of slates and books, learning to read and write. Generally Louie's dreams were cut short by Mamma or Auntie reminding her of her business; and so, with perhaps a little tiny sum, scarcely longer than her own little finger, Louie's work was finished and she could go up to the nursery to be dressed for her walk, and to wait till everybody else was ready to go out.
The nursery was a long room: there was not much furniture standing in it because so much live furniture belonged there, but at one end was a large wardrobe; beside the wardrobe, between it and the door, there was a long ottoman, and near the window was nurse's worktable and chair. There were, no doubt, a few more chairs and other things, but the most important part of the nursery, in the children's eyes, was the stable where lived some very curious animals—an elephant, a camel, and a buffalo; opposite the wardrobe was the fire-place, and a large Indian rug, laid down before the high fender, was all the carpeting of which the nursery could boast. Mamma had her own reasons for thinking that the nursery boards were better without carpet, but the children highly approved of the plan, for the bare boards looked so much more like the sandy desert which the patient camel was intended to traverse, and the wheels, on which the elephant and buffalo moved because they could not move their legs, made a much more business-like rattle on the boards than they could have done on any carpet; so, from the noise made, you might have almost supposed that the rest of mankind were taking holiday while all their business was carried on by those three strange animals and their drivers.
But the children were often called from these nursery expeditions to others through the village or into the wood, for not far from Marine Villa there was a most pleasant wood; there were broad green walks through the midst of this wood, and at all times abundance of whatever flowers, fruits or berries the season afforded. The children often filled their baskets with violets or wood anemones, sometimes, a few ripe wild strawberries, but these were never enough to fill the baskets, and a dozen would have been thought a great deal of; blackberries, when their turn came, made a much greater show, but they were to be found by the roadside or in field hedges more often than in the wood. At the river's edge, a few shells could be picked up, none of a very choice kind, but they pleased the children, and so the walks in and round the quiet village always presented variety enough to charm a simple little girl like Louie.