Read "The Old Stanfield House" by Lucy Ellen Guernsey online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
THE school was closed rather earlier than usual next day, and Calista walked home. She hesitated for a moment when she came to the place where the two roads divided, and then took the lower road, which ran near the bank of the river, and a good deal of the way through oak-scrub and deserted clearings. Calista had been used to walking to and from the village alone for half a dozen years, but it cannot be denied that she felt a little nervous as she went on for one stretch of the road after another, meeting nobody and seeing no human habitation. What if she should meet with wild hogs or cattle? Or, worse still, with some of the more than half-wild "pine rats," who were to be found here and there in the wilderness which thus stretched a great part of the way from Cohansey River to the Atlantic Ocean.
"Pshaw, what a goose I am! " she said to herself impatiently, as she found herself starting at a sudden rustle in the bushes. "I haven't anything worth stealing, and I don't believe any one would want to hurt me."