lean frail arms.

Jo piled baggage and Seymours into the two-seated wagon, although how he managed to stow them all away Ann couldn’t imagine until she saw him do it. The buckboard seemed elastic, and Jerry, the big lumbering old horse, traveled along as though he had no load at all.

9 “Want to sit on the little front seat with me?” Jo asked Ann. Jo had decided at first glance that he liked this thin tall ruddy girl with her bobbed hair. She didn’t seem like the girls he had known; she was more like a boy with her frank smile and clear eyes. No frills or fancies about her, no sly nudgings or giggles that might mean anything, no holding hands. No pretending not to understand his own sensible frankness, no trying to make him remember that she was a girl. She sat beside him as he drove, her bright eyes darting this way and that, letting nothing escape her sight, excitedly seeking out the things that Jo had known every day of his life. Jo knew that if he had gone to Boston he would have felt the same way about things that were different from those at home.

9

Funny thing—he had expected to like the boy best, but even this early Jo saw that he was going to have the most fun with the girl whom he had dreaded meeting.

They seemed to enjoy their drive so much that Jo took them the long way around, through the village. There the houses were grouped together, crouching down like a flock of little chickens about the tall church that looked like a guardian white hen. All around the outskirts green hillocks rose, framing the village into a cuddling nest. This was planned, Jo explained, to protect the houses in winter, when the gales brought the snow out of the north and buried the roads beyond the pine-covered mounds.

10 “The wind blows like all get out,” he chattered. “And the folks are glad to be together so that they can reach the store and the church, and the children can go to school. The wind blows so hard that it passes right over the top of this valley, playing leapfrog over the hills.”

10

“Where do you go to school?” Mrs. Seymour asked from the back seat.

Jo turned to answer her. “I come down here.”

“You mean you come down here to live in winter?”

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