One summer morning, a merry group of children was helping to make hay in one of the Clovernook hay fields.

Not far away stood a little brown house in the cool shade of cherry trees and apple trees. A sweetbrier clambered over the windows, and in the dooryard grew bushes of large red roses.

Near the house was a deep well of clear, cold water. An old-fashioned well sweep was used to draw up the water, as you see in the picture.

This was the Clovernook home. Here lived the merry children who were helping in the hayfield, and there were nine of them. What if the house was small? There was the barn in which they could play, and there were the fields and woods in which they could wander.

They thought their gentle, blue-eyed mother the most beautiful woman in the world. Their father was one of the kindest of men. Every child loved him, and the horses and the cows followed him all over the farm.

He loved books, and went about his work repeating fine old hymns and lines from grand poems. In the long winter evenings he liked to gather his children around him before the open fire. Then he told them wonderful stories of the olden time.

The Clovernook children learned to know the flowers and the trees by name, and to tell the birds by their songs. In the spring they boiled sap for maple sugar. In the fall they gathered nuts, and helped store away the apples in the cellar.

There were two daughters of the Clovernook household who liked nothing so well as their books. They went to school when their mother could spare them from the work of the home. At night they often wished to study, but they had no lamp. So they put some lard into a saucer and used a piece of cloth for a wick.

Year after year these two girls spent all their spare moments in reading and study. What they did when they were older, and how they came to be called the Poet Sisters, you shall soon learn.