the time the snowdrifts had been seven feet deep, but Jo didn’t expect these2 city people to understand what that meant; they could not realize what the Maine people called “a shut-in winter.” The Seymours were coming after the grass had grown green and the fields sprouted up through the brown moist earth, and they would be going home before the cold winds came down from the north woods, the cold that closed so surely and fiercely about the Baileys in their white house on the hill above the sea and shut them in so tightly that they could see nothing but the sea and the great stretches of snow for a long four months at a time.

2

Spring changed the whole world for Jo Bailey, and spring was here now; winter had gone. The soft dirt road sucked up under Jerry’s clumping feet and brooks ran in merry freshets through their deep gutters on either side of the road. So Jo swung the old plow horse into place beside the little station platform and whistled while he waited. The year’s fun would begin to-day. In the early spring he had helped his father plant, but that work was done and so was school, and he had long and pleasant days before him, when his chores could be finished before breakfast.

Jo never had seen the Seymour family and to-day he was going to find out what they were like. There were three of them coming with their father and mother and if they were as nice as their father they’d be all right. Mr. Seymour was a painter who had discovered the Bailey house last year while he was wandering along the Maine coast on a sketching3 trip. He had said that the Bailey farm was the most beautiful place he ever had seen.

3

Of course Jo liked hearing that, and he felt proud at knowing that an artist from Boston found the old farm so lovely, though exactly what the painter saw in the big ocean pounding against the foot of the tall broken cliff, the stretch of smooth meadow running down over the slope of the hill, and the dense pine woods reaching back for miles and miles, Jo couldn’t understand any better than the Seymours could comprehend his winter.

The Seymours were about his own age, Jo was thinking as he sat on a box on the station platform, whistling and waiting. The oldest was a girl, Ann, Mr. Seymour had told him last summer, and Jo was skeptical as to what he might expect from her. A little bit of a fraidcat, probably, always dressing up and particular about her clothes; but he could bear it, if only the boy was spry. “Spry” was a word that meant a great deal in Maine; in Jo’s opinion if a boy was 

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