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It was seventeen miles to Topham. After a while they seemed very far from home, having left the hills far behind, and descended to a great level country with fewer tracts of woodland, and wider fields where the crops were much more forward. The houses were all painted, and the roads were smoother and wider. It had been so pleasant driving along that Katy dreaded going into the strange town when she first caught sight of it, though Susan Ellen kept asking with bold fretfulness if they were not almost there. They counted the steeples of four churches, and their father presently showed them the Topham Academy, where their grandmother once went to school, and told them that perhaps some day they would go there too. Katy’s heart gave a strange leap; it was such a tremendous thing to think of, but instantly the suggestion was transformed for her into one of the certainties of life. She looked with solemn awe at the tall belfry, and the long rows of windows in the front of the academy, there where it stood high and white among the clustering trees. She hoped that they were going to drive by, but something forbade her taking the responsibility of saying so.

Soon the children found themselves among the crowded village houses. Their father turned to look at them with affectionate solicitude.

“Now sit up straight and appear pretty,” he whispered to them. “We’re among the best people now, an’ I want folks to think well of you. ”

“I guess we’re just as good as they be,” remarked Susan Ellen, looking at some innocent passers-by with dark suspicion, but Katy tried indeed to sit straight, and folded her hands prettily in her lap, and wished with all her heart to be pleasing for her father’s sake. Just then an elderly woman saw the wagon and the sedate party it carried, and smiled so kindly that it seemed to Katy as if Topham Corners had welcomed and received them. She smiled back again as if this hospitable person were an old friend, and entirely forgot that the eyes of all Topham had been upon her.

“There, now we’re coming to an elegant house that I want you to see; you’ll never forget it,” said John Hilton. “It’s where Judge Masterson lives, the great lawyer; the handsomest house in the county, everybody says. ”

“Do you know him, father?” asked Susan Ellen.

“I do,” answered John Hilton, proudly. “Him and my mother went to school together in their young days, and were always called the two best scholars of their time. The judge called to see her once; he stopped to our house to see her when I was a boy. An’ then, some years ago—you’ve heard me tell how I was on the jury, an’ when he heard my name spoken he looked at me sharp, and asked if I wa’n’t the son of Catharine Winn, an’ spoke most beautiful of your grandmother, an’ how well he remembered their young days together. ”

“I like to hear about that,” said Katy.

“She had it pretty hard, I’m afraid, up on the old farm. She was keepin’ school in our district when father married her—that’s the main reason I backed ’em down when they wanted to tear the old schoolhouse all to pieces,” confided John Hilton, turning eagerly. “They all say she lived longer up here on the hill than she could anywhere, but she never had her health. I wa’n’t but a boy when she died. Father an’ me lived alone afterward till the time your mother come; ’twas a good while, too; I wa’n’t married so young as some. ’T was lonesome, I tell you; father was plumb discouraged losin’ of his wife, an’ her long sickness an’ all set him back, an’ we’d work all day o
n the land an’ never say a word. I s’pose ’tis bein’ so lonesome early in life that makes me so pleased to have some nice girls growin’ up around me now. ”