Page:Cornelia Meigs--The windy hill.djvu/74

68 There were trees beyond the wall, not the trimmed, well-kept kind that grew in Cousin Jasper's garden, but a scrubby growth of box elder and silver-leaved poplar such as spring up in myriads where the grass is never cut. Hanging over the top of the coping, he could peer through their branches and see a house beyond. He was astonished to see the shingled roof rising so close by, for he had not thought that they had neighbors who dwelt so near.

The house was a square one of yellow stone, with overhanging eaves and small windows and an old-fashioned stoop in front, over which the roof came down in a long sweep. It must have been built a hundred years ago, he thought, and it might have seemed a charming, comfortable old place were it not so unutterably dejected and dingy. Its windows were cracked, the grass grew tall and ragged upon its lawns, a litter of rubbish lay about the back door, and the woodwork, that should have been white, was gray from want of paint.

"It looks as though the people who lived in it just—didn't care," Oliver commented. "It is a nice old house, but it seems worn out and discouraged, somehow, like John Massey's cottage. I wonder who owns it."

An open space between the dwelling and the wall had apparently once been a broad lawn, then had been plowed up for the planting of a patch of grain, and had at last been left as a neglected waste for weeds and brambles to flourish undisturbed. An old