The happy winter wore away. And one March day, under the lee of a rock, they found what looked like a little purple rose, the first hepatica, blooming in the wind and frost and raw air. The brooks were breaking their ice chains then, and racing away; and there was a sound of frogs singing, like silver bells; and look! here was a robin, and there went the flash of a blue-bird’s wing. The buds that had pushed off the leaves last fall were swelling; the air was full of wings, full of song; the rocks were white with saxifrage, the grass slopes were thick with violets; and then came the rich pungent lilac scent every time the old trees shook their purple plumes in the wind; and after that the world looked as if it had spread its wings in the flowering of the apple-orchards; then came the bramble-roses, and summer was warm on all the hills.

“I don’t know how there can be anything more beautiful than summer in this valley between the hills,” said Aunt Rose. “How I wish all the children in the dark crowded city could have such air and sunshine!”

“Oh, Aunt Rose, I wish so too!” said Essie.

“Is it very dark and crowded there?” asked Ally.

“Ally,” said Aunt Rose, “once I saw a street so narrow that it was hardly more than a gutter, and the quarreling women in the high old rickety houses on either side could hit each other with their brooms. And there were little starved-looking children there among those women.”

“Oh! couldn’t we take some of them up here to have some of our summer?” asked Janet.

“Old Uncle wouldn’t like it,” said Jack.

“No, Old Uncle wouldn’t,” said Essie. “He thinks there’s plenty of children here now.”

“I don’t know that,” said Aunt Rose, reflecting a little while. “Once we had Fresh Air children here, a good while ago, and it didn’t disturb him.”

“Perhaps, then, he wouldn’t mind,” said Essie.

The thought of the children in the city was such a sad one to them all that Aunt Rose was sorry she had spoken of them. For there had been some melancholy in the season any way for Essie and Ally, as Bobbo, Ally’s cat, had disappeared; and Essie’s best doll, the one that always went to bed with her, had lost her head in crossing a brook while her little mother stopped on the stepping-stone to show her the picture of herself in the pool just there.

It was in this melancholy time, when Essie and Ally were sitting in the garret one rainy day, and Essie had been telling Ally her dreams concerning the Children of the Hill—who were, to her imagination, not little darlings who had been laid to rest up there, but a sort of angel-people—that Aunt Susan had come up and had cried over the tiny shirt she took from the old bureau-drawer and Ally had tried to comfort her.

“Some day,” little Ally had said, when Aunt Susan had gone down, “some day I am going up to find the Children of the Hill, and ask them to give back Aunt Susan’s baby.”

And it was the very next morning but one that Ally was not to be found—as you read in the beginning of the story—and the whole house and place and Valley were in commotion, and no one knew where to find her.