January was half over before it was possible for the Lanes to take their long-promised trip to New York to look up Bird and bring her back, as her uncle had exacted, a legal sister to Lammy.

Moving from the small house into the large one, even though the necessary repairs were to be made by degrees, was more of an undertaking than Mrs. Lane had bargained for. Also it took Lammy a long time to get “the bones back in his legs,” though happiness and Dr. Jedd’s tonics worked wonders.

Dr. Jedd had suggested that a furnace required much less care than three or four stoves, and so one had been put in. Mrs. Jedd, who had very good taste, and a tactful way of expressing it that never gave offence, suggested to Mrs. Lane that, instead of covering the mahogany parlour set with red plush, the floor with a red-figured tapestry brussels, replacing the small window-panes with great sheets of glass, bricking up the wide fireplace, and then closing the whole room up except, as Joshua said, for funerals, it should be turned into a comfortable living-room.

This suited Joshua, the older boys, and Lammy exactly, and though Lauretta Ann demurred at first, saying, “It didn’t seem hardly respectable not to hev a best room,” she quickly yielded, and said that it “would be a real comfort to have a separate place to eat in when there was a lot of baking on hand and the kitchen all of a tousle, likewise to set in after meals.”

So the old furniture was recovered with a suitable dull green corduroy, and some comfortable Morris chairs added, “that pa and the boys wouldn’t be tempted to set back on the hind legs of the mahogany, which is brittle.” A deep red rug, that would not have to be untacked at housecleaning times, covered the centre of the floor, with Grandmother Lane’s long Thanksgiving dinner-table in the centre, and a smaller round one with folding leaves in the corner, for the entertaining of the friends who were constantly dropping in for a chat and a cup of tea and crullers or a cut of mince pie, for no one in the county had such a reputation for crullers and mince meat, combined with a lavish use of them, as Lauretta Ann Lane.

Next Mrs. Jedd ventured to suggest that the fireplace be left open and some of the big logs, with which Aunt Jimmy had always kept the woodshed filled, simply because her mother had done so before her, used for a nightly hearth fire.

Mrs. Lane said she hadn’t any andirons and the ashes would make dust, but Joshua was so pleased with the idea of returning to old ways that she yielded; and when, on the old fire-board being removed to clean the chimney of soot and swallows’ nests, a pair of tall andirons and a fender were found, the matter settled itself, and Mrs. Lane soon came to take pride in the cheerful blaze, while the best dishes, which were of really handsome blue and white India porcelain, were ranged in racks over the mantel-shelf.

Then there was a sunny southwest window, and Joshua fastened a long shelf in front of this for his wife’s geraniums, wax-plant, and wandering Jew that had shut out the light from the best window in the kitchen, and these brought in the welcome touch of greenery in spite of the particoloured crimped paper with which she insisted upon decorating the pots.

“How Bird will love this room!” Lammy said a dozen times a day, as he remembered how prettily she had arranged the scanty furnishings at the house above the crossroads, and disliked everything that savoured of show or cheap finery, and it seemed to him that Bird’s companionship was the only thing necessary to prove that heaven, instead of being a far-away region, at least had a branch at the fruit farm in Laurelville.

The doctor said that Lammy must not return to school until the midwinter term, and so he spent his time in the shop back of the barn, making many little knickknacks for the house, not a few of them being intended for Bird’s room, for which he also designed a low book-shelf that made a seat in the dormer window, and a table with a hinge that she could use when she wished to draw or paint, and then close against the wall.

This room was next to Mrs. Lane’s, and had two dormer windows and a deep press closet lighted by a high window, under which the washstand stood. It was furnished with a white enamelled bed and a plain white painted dresser, upon which, Lammy said, Bird could paint whatever flowers she chose. There were frilled curtains of striped dimity at the windows, and a quilt and bed valance of the same, for Mrs. Lane despised any ornamental fabric that would not wash and “bile.” The floor was covered with matting, but three sheepskin rugs of home raising and dyed fox colour were placed, one at the side of the bed, one before the bureau, and one under the wall table, upon which Bird’s paint-box stood close to the leather-paper portfolio that Lammy had made to hold the precious sketches.

He had tried his best to find a wall paper with a red “piney” border, but they told him at the great paper warehouse at Northboro that they had never seen such a paper, so he took wild-rose sprays instead.

Lammy had also filled a small bark-covered box with Christmas ferns, ebony spleenwort, wintergreen, partridge-berries, and moss, for the window-ledge, while fresh festoons of ground-pine topped the windows even though Christmas was long past. In fact, Lammy could hardly keep away from the room, and often when he went in, he met his mother, for whom it had the same attraction, and then they would both laugh happily and, closing the door, come away hand in hand.

It never occurred to a single member of this simple, warm-hearted family, that there was any possibility of there being a slip between cup and lip, and in this faith they presently set out upon their pilgrimage to New York, for which event Lammy wore a high collar and a new suit, his first to have long trousers.

The minister’s wife and Dinah Lucky took joint charge of the house while the Lanes were in New York, for they intended staying several days, perhaps a week, as Dr. Jedd said the change was exactly what they all needed after the doings and anxieties of the past eight months, and Mr. Cole, the lawyer from Northboro, gave them the card of a good hotel close to the Grand Central Station, where they would be well treated and neither snubbed nor overcharged. For he well knew that in a New York hotel, Laurelville’s Sunday-best clothes looked as strangely out of place as Dr. Jedd’s carryall would on Fifth Avenue.

During the past few weeks, Alfred Rawley, the new superintendent of the Northboro School of Industrial Art, had made several visits to the Lanes, at first upon business connected with Aunt Jimmy’s legacy, and then because he seemed to like to come. He was a fine-looking man of fifty, and not only a stranger in Northboro, but a bachelor without home ties. He seemed greatly interested in Bird, about whom Lammy talked so constantly that the visitor could not but hear of her, and asked to see the portfolio of drawings in which were some of hers, and he praised them very highly for their promise.

The Lanes arrived in New York just before dark of a Tuesday afternoon, and spent the rest of the evening in looking out of their windows at the remarkable and confused thoroughfare below them that was made still more of a spectacle by the glare of electric lights. Lammy wished to go and look for Bird at once, but his father wouldn’t hear of doing so until broad daylight, saying:—

“Sakes alive, it ain’t safe. I’ve been across Hill’s swamp without a lantern on a foggy night a-callin’ up lost sheep, but that down there with them queer kind o’ two-wheel carts that bob along in narrow places like teeter snipe crossin’ the mill-dam, I’ll not venture it, leastwise not with mother along.” So Lammy went to bed to kill time, but a little later curiosity got the better of Joshua, and he spent an hour in the lobby, where he learned, besides several other things, that the “teeter snipe” carts were called “hansome cabs.”

To the surprise of the early-rising country folk, it was eleven o’clock the next morning before they found themselves ready to take a south-bound Fourth Avenue car, for the visit to Bird, and Joshua told the conductor four times in ten blocks where they wished to get off, and what they were going for, while Mrs. Lane sat still, smiling and quivering all over from the shiney tips of her first boots (other than Congress gaiters) to the jet fandango atop of a real Northboro store bonnet, and the smile was so infectious that it soon spread through the entire car.

When they got off at 24th Street and made the sidewalk in tremulous safety, they marched east in silence, counting the numbers as they went.

“’Tain’t much of a neighbourhood,” sniffed Mrs. Lane, wondering at the ash barrels and pails of swill that lined the way.

“Don’t jedge hasty, mother,” said Joshua; “we mustn’t be hard on city folks that ain’t got our advantages in the way o’ pigs to turn swill into meat, and bog-holes ter swaller ashes what don’t go to road-makin’.”

“We must be near there,” gasped Lauretta Ann, presently. She had been persuaded to have her new gown made a “stylish length” by Hope Snippin, the village dressmaker, in consequence of which she was grasping her skirts on both sides, floundering and plunging along very much like an old-style market schooner, with its sails fouled in the rigging.

“Oh, mother, look there!” said Lammy, with white, trembling lips. He had been running on ahead and keeping track of the numbers, but he now stood still, pointing to a half block of burned and ruined buildings, walled in ice and draped with cruel icicles that seemed to pierce his very flesh as he gazed at them.

For a minute they were all fairly speechless and stood open-mouthed, then Joshua, recovering first, settled his teeth firmly back in place, and laughing feebly, said: “Been a fire, I reckon; thet’s nothing. I’ve heard somethin’ gets afire as often as every week in N’York. They must be somewhere, and we’ll jest calm down and ask the neighbours over the way—in course they’ll know.”

But to Joshua’s wonder they didn’t, at least not definitely, and all he could learn was that the O’Mores had moved somewhere a couple of blocks “over.”

“Gosh, but ain’t N’York a heathen town,” muttered Joshua; “jest think, folks burned out an’ their neighbours don’t take no trouble about ’em; we might even get knocked down, and I bet they wouldn’t be a bit surprised. I’d like to strike fer home.”

As they wandered helplessly along block after block, the crowd of workmen and children in the streets coming home to dinner told that it was noon.

There was no use in going they did not know where, and they had not met a single policeman whom they could question. As they stood upon a corner consulting as to what they had best do, a group of girls coming up and dividing passed on either side of them, one bold-looking chit in a red plush hat and soiled gown singing out something about “When Reuben comes to town,” and giving Lammy a push at the same time.

As he turned to avoid her, he heard his name called, and breaking from her mates, a slender little figure with big black eyes dropped her satchel and flung her arms around his neck, heedless of the merriment and jeers of her companions. Bird was found at last!

“Bird was found at last.”