Armed Neutrality

But this afternoon it had so happened that they found themselves
together, on the hill. Each had filled a basket with the most brilliant,
or harmonious, or vividly contrasted colors they could find. They had
emerged from the wood into the clear autumn sunshine which rested upon
the hill-side, and sat down upon a gray knee of rock, encased with crisp
gray and black lichens. Below lay the Parsonage, with its
weather-blackened, shingled roof, and the garden, full of shrubbery,
intersected by winding paths, the fountain in the centre. The stony road
wound around the spur of the hill, and was visible here and there, in
its slopes and turnings on the way to the village, light buff between
the many-colored bordering of foliage. The winding valley looked like
Nature's color-box; the tall hills beyond, sleeping beneath their
Persian shawls, contrasted richly with the cool pearl-gray of the lower
sky behind them. Away to the right, though seemingly nearer than from
the road below, rose the white steeple of the meeting-house, and,
peeping out around it, the roofs and gable-ends of the village houses.

"There could not be a more lovely place to be happy in!" said Sophie,
sighing from excess of pleasure.

"Any place is as lovely as another when you're in love, I suppose,"
remarked her sister; "that is, if being in love is as nice as poets say
it is."

Sophie looked around with a smile, implying that the best description a
poet ever wrote could give but a faint impression of the reality.