Excerpt from Days and Deeds: A Hundred Years Ago The large brown house on the hill was the jolliest place to Visit that Roger knew anything about. To be sure, there were no children to play with. Baby Alice was not old enough to do much more than sleep or cry, and of course she could not know what a pleasant playmate her big, merry grandfather could be. But Roger knew, though Colonel Davenport was not his grandfather, only his great aunt's husband, and not really a bit related. Still, no grand father could make a boy have a better time; and when, one May morning, Mrs. Saybrook took her son for a month's Visit at the big house, Roger had a right to be the happiest child in the whole Connecticut colony. One thing, however, seemed hard. Colonel Davenport might not be at home very much, for he belonged that year to the Connecticut legislature. It was not so easy to go from Hart ford to Stamford as it is now, and the colonel did not try to get home Often, although some times he would come on Friday or Saturday and spend Sunday with his family. Indeed, he was expected the very week when Roger and his mother began their visit; and with him would come Governor Trumbull and three or four other men who were the colonel's close friends. The people at the big house needed Roger's mother to help get ready for so many guests; they needed a little boy, too, who could run on errands and do all the things that the colonel's own boys had done years before. On Friday afternoon, after three days of run ning and waiting on the little boy's part, every thing was ready for the visitors. Roger had not wasted a minute that day. Long before break fast he had thrown corn to the hungry hens, had led Dobbin and Dolly to the spring, and had helped Jonas, the hired man, to milk the cows. He did not really do any milking himself, but he helped Jonas wonderfully, for he could carry the milking stool and the empty pails. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.