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Title: Real Folks

Author: Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

Release Date: November 9, 2004  [eBook #13997]

Language: English

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REAL FOLKS

by

MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY

1893







CONTENTS


      I. THIS WAY, AND THAT
     II. LUCLARION
    III. BY STORY-RAIL: TWENTY-SIX YEARS AN HOUR
     IV. AFTERWARDS IS A LONG TIME
      V. HOW THE NEWS CAME TO HOMESWORTH
     VI. AND
    VII. WAKING UP
   VIII. EAVESDROPPING IN ASPEN STREET
     IX. HAZEL'S INSPIRATION
      X. COCKLES AND CRAMBO
     XI. MORE WITCH-WORK
    XII. CRUMBS
   XIII. PIECES OF WORLDS
    XIV. "SESAME; AND LILIES"
     XV. WITH ALL ONE'S MIGHT
    XVI. SWARMING
   XVII. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
  XVIII. ALL AT ONCE
    XIX. INSIDE
     XX. NEIGHBORS AND NEXT OF KIN
    XXI. THE HORSESHOE
   XXII. MORNING GLORIES





I.

THIS WAY, AND THAT.


The parlor blinds were shut, and all the windows of the third-story
rooms were shaded; but the pantry window, looking out on a long low
shed, such as city houses have to keep their wood in and to dry
their clothes upon, was open; and out at this window had come two
little girls, with quiet steps and hushed voices, and carried their
books and crickets to the very further end, establishing themselves
there, where the shade of a tall, round fir tree, planted at the
foot of the yard below, fell across the building of a morning.

"It was prettier down on the bricks," Luclarion had told them. But
they thought otherwise.

"Luclarion doesn't know," said Frank. "People _don't_ know things, I
think. I wonder why, when they've got old, and ought to? It's like
the sea-shore here, I guess, only the stones are all stuck down, and
you mustn't pick up the loose ones either."

Frank touched lightly, as she spoke, the white and black and gray
bits of gravel that covered the flat roof.

"And it smells--like the pine forests!"

The sun was hot and bright upon the fir branches and along the
tar-cemented roof.

"How do you know about sea-shores and pine forests?" asked Laura,
with crushing common sense.

"I don't know; but I do," said Frank.

"You don't know anything but stories and pictures and one tree, and
a little gravel, all stuck down tight."

"I'm glad I've got one tree. And the rest of it,--why listen! It's
in the _word_, Laura. _Forest_. Doesn't that sound like thousands of
them, all fresh and rustling? And Ellen went to the sea-shore, in
that book; and picked up pebbles; and the sea came up to her feet,
just as the air comes up here, and you can't get any farther,"--said
Frank, walking to the very edge and putting one foot out over, while
the wind blew in her face up the long opening between rows of brick
houses of which theirs was in the midst upon one side.

"A great sea!" exclaimed Laura, contemptuously. "With all those
other wood-sheds right out in it, all the way down!"

"Well, there's another side to the sea; and capes, and islands,"
answered Frank, turning back. "Besides, I don't pretend it _is_; I
only think it seems a little bit like it. I'm often put in mind of
things. I don't know why."

"I'll tell you what it is like," said Laura. "It's like the gallery
at church, where the singers stand up in a row, and look down, and
all the people look up at them. I like high places. I like Cecilia,
in the 'Bracelets,' sitting at the top, behind, when her name was
called out for the prize; and 'they all made way, and she was on the
floor in an instant.' I should like to have been Cecilia!"

"Leonora was a great deal the best."

"I know it; but she don't _stand out_."

"Laura! You're just like the Pharisees! You're always wishing for
long clothes and high seats!"

"There ain't any Pharisees, nowadays," said Laura, securely. After
which, of course, there was nothing more to be insisted.

Mrs. Lake, the housekeeper, came to the middle upper window, and
moved the blind a little. Frank and Laura were behind the fir. They
saw her through the branches. She, through the farther thickness of
the tree, did not notice them.

"That was good," said Laura. "She would have beckoned us in. I hate
that forefinger of hers; it's always hushing or beckoning. It's only
two inches long. What makes us have to mind it so?"

"She puts it all into those two inches," answered Frank. "All the
_must_ there is in the house. And then you've got to."

"I wouldn't--if father wasn't sick."

"Laura," said Frank, gravely, "I don't believe father is going to
get well. What do you suppose they're letting us stay at home from
school for?"

"O, that," said Laura, "was because Mrs. Lake didn't have time to
sew the sleeves into your brown dress."

"I could have worn my gingham, Laura. What if he should die pretty
soon? I heard her tell Luclarion that there must be a change before
long. They talk in little bits, Laura, and they say it solemn."

The children were silent for a few minutes. Frank sat looking
through the fir-tree at the far-off flecks of blue.

Mr. Shiere had been ill a long time. They could hardly think, now,
what it would seem again not to have a sick father; and they had had
no mother for several years,--many out of their short remembrance of
life. Mrs. Lake had kept the house, and mended their clothes, and
held up her forefinger at them. Even when Mr. Shiere was well, he
had been a reserved man, much absorbed in business since his wife's
death, he had been a very sad man. He loved his children, but he was
very little with them. Frank and Laura could not feel the shock and
loss that children feel when death comes and robs them suddenly of a
close companionship.

"What do you suppose would happen then?" asked Laura, after awhile.
"We shouldn't be anybody's children."

"Yes, we should," said Frank; "we should be God's.'

"Everybody else is that,--_besides_," said Laura.

"We shall have black silk pantalets again, I suppose,"--she began,
afresh, looking down at her white ones with double crimped
ruffles,--"and Mrs. Gibbs will come in and help, and we shall have
to pipe and overcast."

"O, Laura, how nice it was ever so long ago!" cried Frank, suddenly,
never heeding the pantalets, "when mother sent us out to ask company
to tea,--that pleasant Saturday, you know,--and made lace pelerines
for our dolls while we were gone! It's horrid, when other girls have
mothers, only to have a _housekeeper_! And pretty soon we sha'n't
have anything, only a little corner, away back, that we can't hardly
recollect."

"They'll do something with us; they always do," said Laura,
composedly.

The children of this world, even _as_ children, are wisest in their
generation. Frank believed they would be God's children; she could
not see exactly what was to come of that, though, practically. Laura
knew that people always did something; something would be sure to
be done with them. She was not frightened; she was even a little
curious.

A head came up at the corner of the shed behind them, a pair of
shoulders,--high, square, turned forward; a pair of arms, long
thence to the elbows, as they say women's are who might be good
nurses of children; the hands held on to the sides of the steep
steps that led up from the bricked yard. The young woman's face was
thin and strong; two great, clear, hazel eyes looked straight out,
like arrow shots; it was a clear, undeviating glance; it never
wandered, or searched, or wavered, any more than a sunbeam; it
struck full upon whatever was there; it struck _through_ many things
that were transparent to their quality. She had square, white,
strong teeth, that set together like the faces of a die; they showed
easily when she spoke, but the lips closed over them absolutely and
firmly. Yet they were pleasant lips, and had a smile in them that
never went quite out; it lay in all the muscles of the mouth and
chin; it lay behind, in the living spirit that had moulded to itself
the muscles.

This was Luclarion.

"Your Aunt Oldways and Mrs. Oferr have come. Hurry in!"

Now Mrs. Oldways was only an uncle's wife; Mrs. Oferr was their
father's sister. But Mrs. Oferr was a rich woman who lived in New
York, and who came on grand and potent, with a scarf or a pair of
shoe-bows for each of the children in her big trunk, and a hundred
and one suggestions for their ordering and behavior at her tongue's
end, once a year. Mrs. Oldways lived up in the country, and was
"aunt" to half the neighborhood at home, and turned into an aunt
instantly, wherever she went and found children. If there were no
children, perhaps older folks did not call her by the name, but they
felt the special human kinship that is of no-blood or law, but is
next to motherhood in the spirit.

Mrs. Oferr found the open pantry window, before the children had
got in.

"Out there!" she exclaimed, "in the eyes of all the neighbors in the
circumstances of the family! Who does, or _don't_ look after you?"

"Hearts'-sake!" came up the pleasant tones of Mrs. Oldways from
behind, "how can they help it? There isn't any other out-doors. If
they were down at Homesworth now, there'd be the lilac garden and
the old chestnuts, and the seat under the wall. Poor little souls!"
she added, pitifully, as she lifted them in, and kissed them. "It's
well they can take any comfort. Let 'em have all there is."

Mrs. Oferr drew the blinds, and closed the window.

Frank and Laura remembered the strangeness of that day all their
lives. How they sat, shy and silent, while Luclarion brought in cake
and wine; how Mrs. Oferr sat in the large morocco easy-chair and
took some; and Mrs. Oldways lifted Laura, great girl as she was,
into her lap first, and broke a slice for her; how Mrs. Oldways went
up-stairs to Mrs. Lake, and then down into the kitchen to do
something that was needed; and Mrs. Oferr, after she had visited her
brother, lay down in the spare chamber for a nap, tired with her
long journey from New York, though it had been by boat and cars,
while there was a long staging from Homesworth down to Nashua, on
Mrs. Oldways' route. Mrs. Oldways, however, was "used," she said,
"to stepping round." It was the sitting that had tired her.

How they were told not to go out any more, or to run up and
down-stairs; and how they sat in the front windows, looking out
through the green slats at so much of the street world as they could
see in strips; how they obtained surreptitious bits of bread from
dinner, and opened a bit of the sash, and shoved out crumbs under
the blinds for the pigeons that flew down upon the sidewalk; how
they wondered what kind of a day it was in other houses, where there
were not circumstances in the family, where children played, and
fathers were not ill, but came and went to and from their stores;
and where two aunts had not come, both at once, from great ways off,
to wait for something strange and awful that was likely to befall.

When they were taken in, at bedtime, to kiss their father and say
good-night, there was something portentous in the stillness there;
in the look of the sick man, raised high against the pillows, and
turning his eyes wistfully toward them, with no slightest movement
of the head; in the waiting aspect of all things,--the appearance as
of everybody being to sit up all night except themselves.

Edward Shiere brought his children close to him with the magnetism
of that look; they bent down to receive his kiss and his good-night,
so long and solemn. He had not been in the way of talking to them
about religion in his life. He had only insisted on their truth and
obedience; that was the beginning of all religion. Now it was given
him in the hour of his death what he should speak; and because he
had never said many such words to them before, they fell like the
very touch of the Holy Ghost upon their young spirits now,--

"Love God, and keep His commandments. Good-by."

In the morning, when they woke, Mrs. Lake was in their room, talking
in a low voice with Mrs. Oferr, who stood by an open bureau. They
heard Luclarion dusting down the stairs.

Who was taking care of their father?

They did not ask. In the night, he had been taken care of. It was
morning with him, now, also.

Mrs. Lake and Mrs. Oferr were calculating,--about black pantalets,
and other things.

This story is not with the details of their early orphan life. When
Edward Shiere was buried came family consultations. The two aunts
were the nearest friends. Nobody thought of Mr. Titus Oldways. He
never was counted. He was Mrs. Shiere's uncle,--Aunt Oldways'
uncle-in-law, therefore, and grand-uncle to these children. But
Titus Oldways never took up any family responsibilities; he had been
shy of them all his single, solitary life. He seemed to think he
could not drop them as he could other things, if he did not find
them satisfactory. Besides, what would he know about two young
girls?

He saw the death in the paper, and came to the funeral; then he went
away again to his house in Greenley Street at the far West End, and
to his stiff old housekeeper, Mrs. Froke, who knew his stiff old
ways. And, turning his back on everybody, everybody forgot all about
him. Except as now and then, at intervals of years, there broke out
here or there, at some distant point in some family crisis, a sudden
recollection from which would spring a half suggestion, "Why,
there's Uncle Titus! If he was only,"--or, "if he would only,"--and
there it ended. Much as it might be with a housewife, who says of
some stored-away possession forty times, perhaps, before it ever
turns out available, "Why, there's that old gray taffety! If it were
only green, now!" or, "If there were three or four yards more of
it!"

Uncle Titus was just Uncle Titus, neither more nor less; so Mrs.
Oferr and Aunt Oldways consulted about their own measures and
materials; and never reckoned the old taffety at all. There was
money enough to clothe and educate; little more.

"I will take home _one_," said Mrs. Oferr, distinctly.

So, they were to be separated?

They did not realize what this was, however. They were told of
letters and visits; of sweet country-living, of city sights and
pleasures; of kittens and birds' nests, and the great barns; of
music and dancing lessons, and little parties,--"by-and-by, when it
was proper."

"Let me go to Homesworth," whispered Frank to Aunt Oldways.

Laura gravitated as surely to the streets and shops, and the great
school of young ladies.

"One taken and the other left," quoted Luclarion, over the packing
of the two small trunks.

"We're both going," says Laura, surprised. "_One_ taken? Where?"

"Where the carcass is," answered Luclarion.

"There's one thing you'll have to see to for yourselves. I can't
pack it. It won't go into the trunks."

"What, Luclarion?"

"What your father said to you that night."

They were silent. Presently Frank answered, softly,--"I hope I
shan't forget that."

Laura, the pause once broken, remarked, rather glibly, that she "was
afraid there wouldn't be much chance to recollect things at Aunt
Oferr's."

"She isn't exactly what I call a heavenly-minded woman," said
Luclarion, quietly.

"She is very much _occupied_," replied Laura, grandly taking up the
Oferr style. "She visits a great deal, and she goes out in the
carriage. You have to change your dress every day for dinner, and
I'm to take French lessons."

The absurd little sinner was actually proud of her magnificent
temptations. She was only a child. Men and women never are, of
course.

"I'm afraid it will be pretty hard to remember," repeated Laura,
with condescension.

"_That's_ your stump!"

Luclarion fixed the steadfast arrow of her look straight upon her,
and drew the bow with this twang.




II.

LUCLARION.


How Mrs. Grapp ever came to, was the wonder. Her having the baby was
nothing. Her having the name for it was the astonishment.

Her own name was Lucy; her husband's Luther: that, perhaps,
accounted for the first syllable; afterwards, whether her mind
lapsed off into combinations of such outshining appellatives as
"Clara" and "Marion," or whether Mr. Grapp having played the
clarionet, and wooed her sweetly with it in her youth, had anything
to do with it, cannot be told; but in those prescriptive days of
quiet which followed the domestic advent, the name did somehow grow
together in the fancy of Mrs. Luther; and in due time the life-atom
which had been born indistinguishable into the natural world, was
baptized into the Christian Church as "Luclarion" Grapp.
Thenceforth, and no wonder, it took to itself a very especial
individuality, and became what this story will partly tell.

Marcus Grapp, who had the start of Luclarion in this "meander,"--as
their father called the vale of tears,--by just two years' time, and
was y-_clipped_, by everybody but his mother "Mark,"--in his turn,
as they grew old together, cut his sister down to "Luke." Then
Luther Grapp called them both "The Apostles." And not far wrong;
since if ever the kingdom of heaven does send forth its
Apostles--nay, its little Christs--into the work on earth, in these
days, it is as little children into loving homes.

The Apostles got up early one autumn morning, when Mark was about
six years old, and Luke four. They crept out of their small
trundle-bed in their mother's room adjoining the great kitchen, and
made their way out softly to the warm wide hearth.

There were new shoes, a pair apiece, brought home from the Mills the
night before, set under the little crickets in the corners. These
had got into their dreams, somehow, and into the red rooster's first
halloo from the end room roof, and into the streak of pale daylight
that just stirred and lifted the darkness, and showed doors and
windows, but not yet the blue meeting-houses on the yellow
wall-paper, by which they always knew when it was really morning;
and while Mrs. Grapp was taking that last beguiling nap in which one
is conscious that one means to get up presently, and rests so
sweetly on one's good intentions, letting the hazy mirage of the
day's work that is to be done play along the horizon of dim thoughts
with its unrisen activities,--two little flannel night-gowns were
cuddled in small heaps by the chimney-side, little bare feet were
trying themselves into the new shoes, and lifting themselves up,
crippled with two inches of stout string between the heels.

Then the shoes were turned into spans of horses, and chirruped and
trotted softly into their cricket-stables; and then--what else was
there to do, until the strings were cut, and the flannel night-gowns
taken off?

It was so still out here, in the big, busy, day-time room; it was
like getting back where the world had not begun; surely one must do
something wonderful with the materials all lying round, and such an
opportunity as that.

It was old-time then, when kitchens had fire-places; or rather the
house was chiefly fire-place, in front of and about which was more
or less of kitchen-space. In the deep fire-place lay a huge mound of
gray ashes, a Vesuvius, under which red bowels of fire lay hidden.
In one corner of the chimney leaned an iron bar, used sometimes in
some forgotten, old fashioned way, across dogs or pothooks,--who
knows now? At any rate, there it always was.

Mark, ambitious, put all his little strength to it this morning and
drew it down, carefully, without much clatter, on the hearth. Then
he thought how it would turn red under those ashes, where the big
coals were, and how it would shine and sparkle when he pulled it out
again, like the red-hot, hissing iron Jack-the-Giant-Killer struck
into the one-eyed monster's eye. So he shoved it in; and forgot it
there, while he told Luke--very much twisted and dislocated, and
misjoined--the leading incidents of the giant story; and then lapsed
off, by some queer association, into the Scripture narrative of
Joseph and his brethren, who "pulled his red coat off, and put him
in a _fit_, and left him there."

"And then what?" says Luke.

"Then,--O, my iron's done! See here, Luke!"--and taking it prudently
with the tongs, he pulled back the rod, till the glowing end, a foot
or more of live, palpitating, flamy red, lay out upon the broad open
bricks.

"There, Luke! You daresn't put your foot on _that_!"

Dear little Luke, who wouldn't, at even four years old, be dared!

And dear little white, tender, pink-and-lily foot!

The next instant, a shriek of pain shot through Mrs. Grapp's ears,
and sent her out of her dreams and out of her bed, and with one
single impulse into the kitchen, with her own bare feet, and in her
night-gown.

The little foot had only touched; a dainty, timid, yet most
resolute touch; but the sweet flesh shriveled, and the fierce
anguish ran up every fibre of the baby body, to the very heart and
brain.

"O! O, O!" came the long, pitiful, shivering cries, as the mother
gathered her in her arms.

"What is it? What did you do? How came you to?" And all the while
she moved quickly here and there, to cupboard and press-drawer,
holding the child fast, and picking up as she could with one hand,
cotton wool, and sweet-oil flask, and old linen bits; and so she
bound it up, saying still, every now and again, as all she could
say,--"What _did_ you do? How came you to?"

Till, in a little lull of the fearful smart, as the air was shut
away, and the oil felt momentarily cool upon the ache, Luke answered
her,--

"He hed I dare-hn't, and ho I did!"

"You little fool!"

The rough word was half reaction of relief, that the child could
speak at all, half horrible spasm of all her own motherly nerves
that thrilled through and through with every pang that touched the
little frame, hers also. Mothers never do part bonds with babies
they have borne. Until the day they die, each quiver of their life
goes back straight to the heart beside which it began.

"You Marcus! What did you mean?"

"I meant she darsn't; and she no business to 'a dars't," said Mark,
pale with remorse and fright, but standing up stiff and manful, with
bare common sense, when brought to bay. And then he marched away
into his mother's bedroom, plunged his head down into the clothes,
and cried,--harder than Luclarion.

Nobody wore any new shoes that day; Mark for a punishment,--though
he flouted at the penalty as such, with an, "I guess you'd see me!"
And there were many days before poor little Luclarion could wear any
shoes at all.

The foot got well, however, without hindrance. But Luke was the same
little fool as ever; that was not burnt out. She would never be
"dared" to anything.

They called it "stumps" as they grew older. They played "stumps" all
through the barns and woods and meadows; over walls and rocks, and
rafters and house-roofs. But the burnt foot saved Luke's neck scores
of times, doubtless. Mark remembered it; he never "stumped" her to
any certain hurt, or where he could not lead the way himself.

The mischief they got into and out of is no part of my story; but
one day something happened--things do happen as far back in lives as
that--which gave Luclarion her clew to the world.

They had got into the best parlor,--that sacred place of the New
England farm-house, that is only entered by the high-priests
themselves on solemn festivals, weddings and burials, Thanksgivings
and quiltings; or devoutly, now and then to set the shrine in order,
shut the blinds again, and so depart, leaving it to gather the gloom
and grandeur that things and places and people do when they are good
for nothing else.

The children had been left alone; for their mother had gone to a
sewing society, and Grashy, the girl, was up-stairs in her
kitchen-chamber-bedroom, with a nail over the door-latch to keep
them out while she "fixed over" her best gown.

"Le's play Lake Ontario," says Marcus.

Now Lake Ontario, however they had pitched upon it, stood with them
for all the waters that are upon the face of the earth, and all the
confusion and peril of them. To play it, they turned the room into
one vast shipwreck, of upset and piled up chairs, stools, boxes,
buckets, and what else they could lay hands on; and among and over
them they navigated their difficult and hilarious way. By no means
were they to touch the floor; that was the Lake,--that were to
drown.

It was Columbus sometimes; sometimes it was Captain Cook; to-day, it
was no less than Jason sailing after the golden fleece.

Out of odd volumes in the garret, and out of "best books" taken down
from the secretary in the "settin'-room," and put into their hands,
with charges, of a Sunday, to keep them still, they had got these
things, jumbled into strange far-off and near fantasies in their
childish minds. "Lake Ontario" included and connected all.

"I'll tell you what it is," said Marcus, tumbling up against the
parlor door and an idea at once. "In here!"

"What?" asked Luke, breathless, without looking up, and paddling
with the shovel, from an inverted rocking-chair.

"The golden thing! Hush!"

At this moment Grashy came into the kitchen, took a little tin
kettle from a nail over the dresser, and her sun-bonnet from another
behind the door, and made her way through the apartment as well as
she could for bristling chair-legs, with exemplary placidity. She
was used to "Lake Ontario."

"Don't get into any mischief, you Apostles," was her injunction.
"I'm goin' down to Miss Ruddock's for some 'east."

"Good,"; says Mark, the instant the door was shut "Now this is
Colchis, and I'm going in."

He pronounced it much like "cold-cheese," and it never occurred to
him that he was naming any unusual or ancient locality. There was a
"Jason" in the Mills Village. He kept a grocer's shop. Colchis might
be close by for all he knew; out beyond the wall, perhaps, among the
old barrels. Children _place_ all they read or hear about, or even
all they imagine, within a very limited horizon. They cannot go
beyond their world. Why should they? Neither could those very
venerable ancients.

"'Tain't," says Luclarion, with unbeguiled practicality. "It's just
ma's best parlor, and you mustn't."

It was the "mustn't" that was the whole of it. If Mark had asserted
that the back kitchen, or the cellar-way closet was Colchis, she
would have indorsed it with enthusiasm, and followed on like a loyal
Argonaut, as she was. But her imagination here was prepossessed.
Nothing in old fable could be more environed with awe and mystery
than this best parlor.

"And, besides," said Luclarion, "I don't care for the golden
fleece; I'm tired of it. Let's play something else."

"I'll tell you what there is in here," persisted Mark. "There's two
enchanted children. I've seen 'em!"

"Just as though," said Luke contemptuously. "Ma ain't a witch."

"Tain't ma. She don't know. They ain't visible to her. _She_ thinks
it's nothing but the best parlor. But it opens out, right into the
witch country,--not for her. 'Twill if we go. See if it don't."

He had got hold of her now; Luclarion could not resist that.
Anything might be true of that wonderful best room, after all. It
was the farthest Euxine, the witch-land, everything, to them.

So Mark turned the latch and they crept in

"We must open a shutter," Mark said, groping his way.

"Grashy will be back," suggested Luke, fearfully.

"Guess so!" said Mark. "She ain't got coaxed to take her sun-bonnet
off yet, an' it'll take her ninety-'leven hours to get it on again."

He had let in the light now from the south window.

The red carpet on the floor; the high sofa of figured hair-cloth,
with brass-headed nails, and brass rosettes in the ends of the hard,
cylinder pillows; the tall, carved cupboard press, its doors and
drawers glittering with hanging brass handles; right opposite the
door by which they had come in, the large, leaning mirror,
gilt--garnished with grooved and beaded rim and an eagle and
ball-chains over the top,--all this, opening right in from the
familiar every-day kitchen and their Lake Ontario,--it certainly
meant something that such a place should be. It meant a great deal
more than sixteen feet square could hold, and what it really was did
not stop short at the gray-and-crimson stenciled walls.

The two were all alone in it; perhaps they had never been all alone
in it before. I think, notwithstanding their mischief and
enterprise, they never had.

And deep in the mirror, face to face with them, coming down, it
seemed, the red slant of an inner and more brilliant floor, they saw
two other little figures. Their own they knew, really, but elsewhere
they never saw their own figures entire. There was not another
looking-glass in the house that was more than two feet long, and
they were all hung up so high!

"There!" whispered Mark. "There they are, and they can't get out."

"Of course they can't," said sensible Luclarion.

"If we only knew the right thing to say, or do, they might," said
Mark. "It's that they're waiting for, you see. They always do. It's
like the sleeping beauty Grashy told us."

"Then they've got to wait a hundred years," said Luke.

"Who knows when they began?"

"They do everything that we do," said Luclarion, her imagination
kindling, but as under protest. "If we could jump in perhaps they
would jump out."

"We might jump _at_ 'em," said Marcus. "Jest get 'em going, and
may-be they'd jump over. Le's try."

So they set up two chairs from Lake Ontario in the kitchen doorway,
to jump from; but they could only jump to the middle round of the
carpet, and who could expect that the shadow children should be
beguiled by that into a leap over bounds? They only came to the
middle round of _their_ carpet.

"We must go nearer; we must set the chairs in the middle, and jump
close. Jest _shave_, you know," said Marcus.

"O, I'm afraid," said Luclarion.

"I'll tell you what! Le's _run_ and jump! Clear from the other side
of the kitchen, you know. Then they'll have to run too, and may-be
they can't stop."

So they picked up chairs and made a path, and ran from across the
broad kitchen into the parlor doorway, quite on to the middle round
of the carpet, and then with great leaps came down bodily upon the
floor close in front of the large glass that, leaned over them, with
two little fallen figures in it, rolling aside quickly also, over
the slanting red carpet.

But, O dear what did it?

Had the time come, anyhow, for the old string to part its last
fibre, that held the mirror tilting from the wall,--or was it the
crash of a completed spell?

There came a snap,--a strain,--as some nails or screws that held it
otherwise gave way before the forward pressing weight, and down,
flat-face upon the floor, between the children, covering them with
fragments of splintered glass and gilded wood,--eagle, ball-chains,
and all,--that whole magnificence and mystery lay prostrate.

Behind, where it had been, was a blank, brown-stained cobwebbed
wall, thrown up harsh and sudden against them, making the room
small, and all the enchanted chamber, with its red slanting carpet,
and its far reflected corners, gone.

The house hushed up again after that terrible noise, and stood just
the same as ever. When a thing like that happens, it tells its own
story, just once, and then it is over. _People_ are different. They
keep talking.

There was Grashy to come home. She had not got there in time to hear
the house tell it. She must learn it from the children. Why?

"Because they knew," Luclarion said. "Because, then, they could not
wait and let it be found out."

"We never touched it," said Mark.

"We jumped," said Luke.

"We couldn't help it, if _that_ did it. S'posin' we'd jumped in the
kitchen, or--the--flat-irons had tumbled down,--or anything? That
old string was all wore out."

"Well, we was here, and we jumped; and we know."

"We was here, of course; and of course we couldn't help knowing,
with all that slam-bang. Why, it almost upset Lake Ontario! We can
tell how it slammed, and how we thought the house was coming down. I
did."

"And how we were in the best parlor, and how we jumped," reiterated
Luclarion, slowly. "Marcus, it's a stump!"

They were out in the middle of Lake Ontario now, sitting right down
underneath the wrecks, upon the floor; that is, under water, without
ever thinking of it. The parlor door was shut, with all that
disaster and dismay behind it.

"Go ahead, then!" said Marcus, and he laid himself back desperately
on the floor. "There's Grashy!"

"Sakes and patience!" ejaculated Grashy, merrily, coming in.
"They're drownded,--dead, both of 'em; down to the bottom of Lake
Ontariah!"

"No we ain't," said Luclarion, quietly. "It isn't Lake Ontario now.
It's nothing but a clutter. But there's an awful thing in the best
parlor, and we don't know whether we did it or not. We were in
there, and we jumped."

Grashy went straight to the parlor door, and opened it. She looked
in, turned pale, and said "'Lection!"

That is a word the women have, up in the country, for solemn
surprise, or exceeding emergency, or dire confusion. I do not know
whether it is derived from religion or politics. It denotes a vital
crisis, either way, and your hands full. Perhaps it had the
theological association in Grashy's mind, for the next thing she
said was, "My soul!"

"Do you know what that's a sign of, you children?"

"Sign the old thing was rotten," said Marcus, rather sullenly.

"Wish that was all," said Grashy, her lips white yet. "Hope there
mayn't nothin' dreadful happen in this house before the year's out.
It's wuss'n thirteen at the table."

"Do you s'pose we did it?" asked Luke, anxiously.

"Where was you when it tumbled?"

"Right in front of it. But we were rolling away. _We_ tumbled."

"'Twould er come down the fust jar, anyway, if a door had slammed.
The string's cut right through," said Grashy, looking at the two
ends sticking up stiff and straight from the top fragment of the
frame. "But the mercy is you war'n't smashed yourselves to bits and
flinders. Think o'that!"

"Do you s'pose ma'll think of that?" asked Luclarion.

"Well--yes; but it may make her kinder madder,--just at first, you
know. Between you and me and the lookin'-glass, you see,--well, yer
ma is a pretty strong-feelin' woman," said Grashy, reflectively.
"'Fi was you I wouldn't say nothin' about it. What's the use? _I_
shan't."

"It's a stump," repeated Luclarion, sadly, but in very resolute
earnest.

Grashy stared.

"Well, if you ain't the curiousest young one, Luke Grapp!" said she,
only half comprehending.

When Mrs. Grapp came home, Luclarion went into her bedroom after
her, and told her the whole story. Mrs. Grapp went into the parlor,
viewed the scene of calamity, took in the sense of loss and narrowly
escaped danger, laid the whole weight of them upon the disobedience
to be dealt with, and just as she had said, "You little fool!" out
of the very shock of her own distress when Luke had burned her baby
foot, she turned back now, took the two children up-stairs in
silence, gave them each a good old orthodox whipping, and tucked
them into their beds.

They slept one on each side of the great kitchen-chamber.

"Mark," whispered Luke, tenderly, after Mrs. Grapp's step had died
away down the stairs. "How do you feel?"

"Hot!" said Mark. "How do you?"

"You ain't mad with me, be you?"

"No."

"Then I feel real cleared up and comfortable. But it _was_ a stump,
wasn't it?"

       *       *       *       *       *

From that time forward, Luclarion Grapp had got her light to go by.
She understood life. It was "stumps" all through. The Lord set them,
and let them; she found that out afterward, when she was older, and
"experienced religion." I think she was mistaken in the dates,
though; it was _recognition_, this later thing; the experience was
away back,--at Lake Ontario.

It was a stump when her father died, and her mother had to manage
the farm, and she to help her. The mortgage they had to work off was
a stump; but faith and Luclarion's dairy did it. It was a stump when
Marcus wanted to go to college, and they undertook that, after the
mortgage. It was a stump when Adam Burge wanted her to marry him,
and go and live in the long red cottage at Side Hill, and she could
not go till they had got through with helping Marcus. It was a
terrible stump when Adam Burge married Persis Cone instead, and she
had to live on and bear it. It was a stump when her mother died, and
the farm was sold.

Marcus married; he never knew; he had a belles-lettres professorship
in a new college up in D----. He would not take a cent of the farm
money; he had had his share long ago; the four thousand dollars
were invested for Luke. He did the best he could, and all he knew;
but human creatures can never pay each other back. Only God can do
that, either way.

Luclarion did not stay in ----. There were too few there now, and
too many. She came down to Boston. Her two hundred and eighty
dollars a year was very good, as far as it went, but it would not
keep her idle; neither did she wish to live idle. She learned
dress-making; she had taste and knack; she was doing well; she
enjoyed going about from house to house for her days' work, and then
coming back to her snug room at night, and her cup of tea and her
book.

Then it turned out that so much sewing was not good for her; her
health was threatened; she had been used to farm work and "all
out-doors." It was a "stump" again. That was all she called it; she
did not talk piously about a "cross." What difference did it make?
There is another word, also, for "cross" in Hebrew.

Luclarion came at last to live with Mrs. Edward Shiere. And in that
household, at eight and twenty, we have just found her.




III.

BY STORY-RAIL: TWENTY-SIX YEARS AN HOUR.


Laura Shiere did not think much about the "stump," when, in her dark
gray merino travelling dress, and her black ribbons, nicely
appointed, as Mrs. Oferr's niece should be, down to her black kid
gloves and broad-hemmed pocket-handkerchief, and little black straw
travelling-basket (for morocco bags were not yet in those days), she
stepped into the train with her aunt at the Providence Station, on
her way to Stonington and New York.

The world seemed easily laid out before her. She was like a cousin
in a story-book, going to arrive presently at a new home, and begin
a new life, in which she would be very interesting to herself and to
those about her. She felt rather important, too, with her money
independence--there being really "property" of hers to be spoken of
as she had heard it of late. She had her mother's diamond ring on
her third finger, and was comfortably conscious of it when she drew
off her left-hand glove. Laura Shiere's nature had only been
stirred, as yet, a very little below the surface, and the surface
rippled pleasantly in the sunlight that was breaking forth from the
brief clouds.

Among the disreputable and vociferous crowd of New York hack
drivers, that swarmed upon the pier as the _Massachusetts_ glided
into her dock, it was good to see that subduedly respectable and
consciously private and superior man in the drab overcoat and the
nice gloves and boots, who came forward and touched his hat to Mrs.
Oferr, took her shawl and basket, and led the way, among the
aggravated public menials, to a handsome private carriage waiting on
the street.

"All well at home, David?" asked Mrs. Oferr.

"All well, ma'am, thank you," replied David.

And another man sat upon the box, in another drab coat, and touched
_his_ hat; and when they reached Waverley Place and alighted, Mrs.
Oferr had something to say to him of certain directions, and
addressed him as "Moses."

It was very grand and wonderful to order "David" and "Moses" about.
Laura felt as if her aunt were something only a little less than
"Michael with the sword." Laura had a susceptibility for dignities;
she appreciated, as we have seen out upon the wood-shed, "high
places, and all the people looking up."

David and Moses were brothers, she found out; she supposed that was
the reason they dressed alike, in drab coats; as she and Frank used
to wear their red merinos, and their blue ginghams. A little spasm
did come up in her throat for a minute, as she thought of the old
frocks and the old times already dropped so far behind; but Alice
and Geraldine Oferr met her the next instant on the broad staircase
at the back of the marble-paved hall, looking slight and delicate,
and princess-like, in the grand space built about them for their
lives to move in; and in the distance and magnificence of it all,
the faint little momentary image of Frank faded away.

She went up with them out of the great square hall, over the stately
staircase, past the open doors of drawing-rooms and library,
stretching back in a long suite, with the conservatory gleaming
green from the far end over the garden, up the second stairway to
the floor where their rooms were; bedrooms and nursery,--this last
called so still, though the great, airy front-room was the place
used now for their books and amusements as growing young
ladies,--all leading one into another around the skylighted upper
hall, into which the sunshine came streaked with amber and violet
from the richly colored glass. She had a little side apartment given
to her for her own, with a recessed window, in which were blossoming
plants just set there from the conservatory; opposite stood a white,
low bed in a curtained alcove, and beyond was a dressing-closet.
Laura thought she should not be able to sleep there at all for a
night or two, for the beauty of it and the good time she should be
having.

At that same moment Frank and her Aunt Oldways were getting down
from the stage that had brought them over from Ipsley, where they
slept after their day's journey from Boston,--at the doorstone of
the low, broad-roofed, wide-built, roomy old farm-house in
Homesworth.

Right in the edge of the town it stood, its fields stretching over
the south slope of green hills in sunny uplands, and down in meadowy
richness to the wild, hidden, sequestered river-side, where the
brown water ran through a narrow, rocky valley,--Swift River they
called it. There are a great many Swift Rivers in New England. It
was only a vehement little tributary of a larger stream, beside
which lay larger towns; it was doing no work for the world,
apparently, at present; there were no mills, except a little
grist-mill to which the farmers brought their corn, cuddled among
the rocks and wild birches and alders, at a turn where the road came
down, and half a dozen planks made a bit of a bridge.

"O, what beautiful places!" cried Frank, as they crossed the little
bridge, and glanced either way into a green, gray, silvery vista of
shrubs and rocks, and rushing water, with the white spires of
meadow-sweet and the pink hardback, and the first bright plumes of
the golden rod nodding and shining against the shade,--as they
passed the head of a narrow, grassy lane, trod by cows' feet, and
smelling of their milky breaths, and the sweetness of hay-barns,--as
they came up, at length, over the long slope of turf that carpeted
the way, as for a bride's feet, from the roadside to the very
threshold. She looked along the low, treble-piled garden wall, too,
and out to the open sheds, deep with pine chips; and upon the broad
brown house-roof, with its long, gradual decline, till its eaves
were within reach of a child's fingers from the ground; and her
quick eye took in facilities.

"O, if Laura could see this! After the old shed-top in Brier Street,
and the one tree!"

But Laura had got what the shed-top stood for with her; it was
Frank who had hearkened to whole forests in the stir of the one
brick-rooted fir. To that which each child had, it was already
given.

In a week or two Frank wrote Laura a letter. It was an old-fashioned
letter, you know; a big sheet, written close, four pages,
all but the middle of the last page, which was left for the
"superscription." Then it was folded, the first leaf turned down
twice, lengthwise; then the two ends laid over, toward each other;
then the last doubling, or rather trebling, across; and the open
edge slipped over the folds. A wafer sealed it, and a thimble
pressed it,--and there were twenty-five cents postage to pay. That
was a letter in the old times, when Laura and Frank Shiere were
little girls. And this was that letter:--

     DEAR LAURA,--We got here safe, Aunt Oldways and I, a week ago
     last Saturday, and it is _beautiful_. There is a green
     lane,--almost everybody has a green lane,--and the cows go up
     and down, and the swallows build in the barn-eaves. They fly
     out at sundown, and fill all the sky up. It is like the specks
     we used to watch in the sunshine when it came in across the
     kitchen, and they danced up and down and through and away, and
     seemed to be live things; only we couldn't tell, you know, what
     they were, or if they really did know how good it was. But
     these are big and real, and you can see their wings, and you
     know what they mean by it. I guess it is all the same thing,
     only some things are little and some are big. You can see the
     stars here, too,--such a sky full. And that is all the same
     again.

     There are beautiful roofs and walls here. I guess you would
     think you were high up! Harett and I go up from under the
     cheese-room windows right over the whole house, and we sit on
     the peak by the chimney. Harett is Mrs. Dillon's girl. Not the
     girl that lives with her,--her daughter. But the girls that
     live with people are daughters here. Somebody's else, I mean.
     They are all alike. I suppose her name is Harriet, but they all
     call her Harett. I don't like to ask her for fear she should
     think I thought they didn't know how to pronounce.

     I go to school with Harett; up to the West District. We carry
     brown bread and butter, and doughnuts, and cheese, and
     apple-pie in tin pails, for luncheon. Don't you remember the
     brown cupboard in Aunt Oldways' kitchen, how sagey, and
     doughnutty, and good it always smelt? It smells just so now,
     and everything tastes just the same.

     There is a great rock under an oak tree half way up to school,
     by the side of the road. We always stop there to rest, coming
     home. Three of the girls come the same way as far as that, and
     we always save some of our dinner to eat up there, and we tell
     stories. I tell them about dancing-school, and the time we went
     to the theatre to see "Cinderella," and going shopping with
     mother, and our little tea-parties, and the Dutch dolls we made
     up in the long front chamber. O, _don't_ you remember, Laura?
     What different pieces we have got into our remembrances
     already! I feel as if I was making patchwork. Some-time,
     may-be, I shall tell somebody about living _here_. Well, they
     will be beautiful stories! Homesworth is an elegant place to
     live in. You will see when you come next summer.

     There is an apple tree down in the south orchard that bends
     just like a horse's back. Then the branches come up over your
     head and shade you. We ride there, and we sit and eat summer
     apples there. Little rosy apples with dark streaks in them all
     warm with the sun. You can't think what a smell they have, just
     like pinks and spice boxes. Why don't they keep a little way
     off from each other in cities, and so have room for apple
     trees? I don't see why they need to crowd so. I hate to think
     of you all shut up tight when I am let right out into green
     grass, and blue sky, and apple orchards. That puts me in mind
     of something! Zebiah Jane, Aunt Oldways' girl, always washes
     her face in the morning at the pump-basin out in the back
     dooryard, just like the ducks. She says she can't spatter round
     in a room; she wants all creation for a slop-bowl. I feel as if
     we had all creation for everything up here. But I can't put all
     creation in a letter if I try. _That_ would spatter dreadfully.

     I expect a long letter from you every day now. But I don't see
     what you will make it out of. I think I have got all the
     _things_ and you won't have anything left but the _words_. I am
     sure you don't sit out on the wood-shed at Aunt Oferr's, and I
     don't believe you pound stones and bricks, and make colors. Do
     you know when we rubbed our new shoes with pounded stone and
     made them gray?

     I never told you about Luclarion. She came up as soon as the
     things were all sent off, and she lives at the minister's.
     Where she used to live is only two miles from here, but other
     people live there now, and it is built on to and painted straw
     color, with a green door.

                  Your affectionate sister,
                                FRANCES SHIERE.


When Laura's letter came this was it:--

     DEAR FRANK,--I received your kind letter a week ago, but we
     have been very busy having a dressmaker and doing all our fall
     shopping, and I have not had time to answer it before. We shall
     begin to go to school next week, for the vacations are over,
     and then I shall have ever so much studying to do. I am to take
     lessons on the piano, too, and shall have to practice two hours
     a day. In the winter we shall have dancing-school and
     practicing parties. Aunt has had a new bonnet made for me. She
     did not like the plain black silk one. This is of _gros
     d'Afrique_, with little bands and cordings round the crown and
     front; and I have a dress of _gros d'Afrique_, too, trimmed
     with double folds piped on. For every-day I have a new black
     _mousseline_ with white clover leaves on it, and an all-black
     French chally to wear to dinner. I don't wear my black and
     white calico at all. Next summer aunt means to have me wear
     white almost all the time, with lavender and violet ribbons. I
     shall have a white muslin with three skirts and a black sash to
     wear to parties and to Public Saturdays, next winter. They have
     Public Saturdays at dancing-school every three weeks. But only
     the parents and relations can come. Alice and Geraldine dance
     the shawl-dance with Helena Pomeroy, with crimson and white
     Canton crape scarfs. They have showed me some of it at home.
     Aunt Oferr says I shall learn the _gavotte_.

     Aunt Oferr's house is splendid. The drawing-room is full of
     sofas, and divans, and ottomans, and a _causeuse_, a little
     S-shaped seat for two people. Everything is covered with blue
     velvet, and there are blue silk curtains to the windows, and
     great looking-glasses between, that you can see all down into
     through rooms and rooms, as if there were a hundred of them. Do
     you remember the story Luclarion used to tell us of when she
     and her brother Mark were little children and used to play that
     the looking-glass-things were real, and that two children lived
     in them, in the other room, and how we used to make believe too
     in the slanting chimney glass? You could make believe it here
     with _forty_ children. But I don't make believe much now. There
     is such a lot that is real, and it is all so grown up. It would
     seem so silly to have such plays, you know. I can't help
     thinking the things that come into my head though, and it seems
     sometimes just like a piece of a story, when I walk into the
     drawing-room all alone, just before company comes, with my
     _gros d'Afrique_ on, and my puffed lace collar, and my hair
     tied back with long new black ribbons. It all goes through my
     head just how I look coming in, and how grand it is, and what
     the words would be in a book about it, and I seem to act a
     little bit, just to myself as if I were a girl in a story, and
     it seems to say, "And Laura walked up the long drawing-room and
     took a book bound in crimson morocco from the white marble pier
     table and sat down upon the velvet ottoman in the balcony
     window." But what happened then it never tells. I suppose it
     will by and by. I am getting used to it all, though; it isn't
     so _awfully_ splendid as it was at first.

     I forgot to tell you that my new bonnet flares a great deal,
     and that I have white lace quilling round the face with little
     black dotty things in it on stems. They don't wear those close
     cottage bonnets now. And aunt has had my dresses made longer
     and my pantalettes shorter, so that they hardly show at all.
     She says I shall soon wear long dresses, I am getting so tall.
     Alice wears them now, and her feet look so pretty, and she has
     such pretty slippers: little French purple ones, and sometimes
     dark green, and sometimes beautiful light gray, to go with
     different dresses. I don't care for anything but the slippers,
     but I _should_ like such ones as hers. Aunt says I can't, of
     course, as long as I wear black, but I can have purple ones
     next summer to wear with my white dresses. That will be when I
     come to see you.

     I am afraid you will think this is a very _wearing_ kind of a
     letter, there are so many 'wears' in it. I have been reading it
     over so far, but I can't put in any other word.

                  Your affectionate sister,
                                   LAURA SHIERE.

     P.S. Aunt Oferr says Laura Shiere is such a good sounding name.
     It doesn't seem at all common. I am glad of it. I should hate
     to be common.

I do not think I shall give you any more of it just here than these
two letters tell. We are not going through all Frank and Laura's
story. That with which we have especially to do lies on beyond. But
it takes its roots in this, as all stories take their roots far back
and underneath.

Two years after, Laura was in Homesworth for her second summer visit
at the farm. It was convenient, while the Oferrs were at Saratoga.
Mrs. Oferr was very much occupied now, of course, with introducing
her own daughters. A year or two later, she meant to give Laura a
season at the Springs. "All in turn, my dear, and good time," she
said.

The winter before, Frank had been a few weeks in New York. But it
tired her dreadfully, she said. She liked the theatres and the
concerts, and walking out and seeing the shops. But there was "no
place to get out of it into." It didn't seem as if she ever really
got home and took off her things. She told Laura it was like that
first old letter of hers; it was just "wearing," all the time.

Laura laughed. "But how can you live _without_ wearing?" said she.

Frank stood by, wondering, while Laura unpacked her trunks that
morning after her second arrival at Aunt Oldways'. She had done now
even with the simplicity of white and violet, and her wardrobe
blossomed out like the flush of a summer garden.

She unfolded a rose-colored muslin, with little raised embroidered
spots, and threw it over the bed.

"Where _will_ you wear that, up here?" asked Frank, in pure
bewilderment.

"Why, I wear it to church, with my white Swiss mantle," answered
Laura. "Or taking tea, or anything. I've a black silk _visite_ for
cool days. That looks nice with it. And see here,--I've a pink
sunshade. They don't have them much yet, even in New York. Mr.
Pemberton Oferr brought these home from Paris, for Gerry and Alice,
and me. Gerry's is blue. See! it tips back." And Laura set the dashy
little thing with its head on one side, and held it up coquettishly.

"They used them in carriages in Paris, he said, and in St.
Petersburg, driving out on the Nevskoi Prospekt."

"But where are your common things?"

"Down at the bottom; I haven't come to them. They were put in first,
because they would bear squeezing. I've two French calicoes, with
pattern trimmings; and a lilac jaconet, with ruffles, open down the
front."

Laura wore long dresses now; and open wrappers were the height of
the style.

Laura astonished Homesworth the first Sunday of this visit, with her
rose-colored toilet. Bonnet of shirred pink silk with moss rosebuds
and a little pink lace veil; the pink muslin, full-skirted over two
starched petticoats; even her pink belt had gay little borders of
tiny buds and leaves, and her fan had a pink tassel.

"They're the things I wear; why shouldn't I?" she said to Frank's
remonstrance.

"But up here!" said Frank. "It would seem nicer to wear
something--stiller."

So it would; a few years afterward Laura herself would have seen
that it was more elegant; though Laura Shiere was always rather
given to doing the utmost--in apparel--that the occasion tolerated.
Fashions grew stiller in years after. But this June Sunday,
somewhere in the last thirties or the first forties, she went into
the village church like an Aurora, and the village long remembered
the resplendence. Frank had on a white cambric dress, with a real
rose in the bosom, cool and fresh, with large green leaves; and her
"cottage straw" was trimmed with white lutestring, crossed over the
crown.

"Do you feel any better?" asked Aunt Oldways of Laura, when they
came home to the country tea-dinner.

"Better--how?" asked Laura, in surprise.

"After all that 'wear' and _stare_," said Aunt Oldways, quietly.

Aunt Oldways might have been astonished, but she was by no means
awestruck, evidently; and Aunt Oldways generally spoke her mind.

Somehow, with Laura Shiere, pink was pinker, and ribbons were more
rustling than with most people. Upon some quiet unconscious folks,
silk makes no spread, and color little show; with Laura every gleam
told, every fibre asserted itself. It was the live Aurora, bristling
and tingling to its farthest electric point. She did not toss or
flaunt, either; she had learned better of Signor Pirotti how to
carry herself; but she was in conscious _rapport_ with every thing
and stitch she had about her. Some persons only put clothes on to
their bodies; others really seem to contrive to put them on to their
souls.

Laura Shiere came up to Homesworth three years later, with something
more wonderful than a pink embossed muslin:--she had a lover.

Mrs. Oferr and her daughters were on their way to the mountains;
Laura was to be left with the Oldways. Grant Ledwith accompanied
them all thus far on their way; then he had to go back to Boston.

"I can't think of anything but that pink sunshade she used to carry
round canted all to one side over her shoulder," said Aunt Oldways,
looking after them down the dusty road the morning that he went
away. Laura, in her white dress and her straw hat and her silly
little bronze-and-blue-silk slippers printing the roadside gravel,
leaning on Grant Ledwith's arm, seemed only to have gained a fresh,
graceful adjunct to set off her own pretty goings and comings with,
and to heighten the outside interest of that little point of
eternity that she called her life. Mr. Ledwith was not so much a man
who had won a woman, as Laura was a girl who had "got a beau."

She had sixteen tucked and trimmed white skirts, too, she told
Frank; she should have eight more before she was married; people
wore ever so many skirts now, at a time. She had been to a party a
little while ago where she wore _seven_.

There were deep French embroidery bands around some of these white
skirts; those were beautiful for morning dresses. Geraldine Oferr
was married last winter; Laura had been her bridesmaid; Gerry had a
white brocade from Paris, and a point-lace veil. She had three dozen
of everything, right through. They had gone to housekeeping up town,
in West Sixteenth Street. Frank would have to come to New York next
winter, or in the spring, to be _her_ bridesmaid; then she would
see; then--who knew!

Frank was only sixteen, and she lived away up here in Homesworth
among the hills; she had not "seen," but she had her own little
secret, for all that; something she neither told nor thought, yet
which was there; and it came across her with a queer little thrill
from the hidden, unlooked-at place below thought, that "Who"
_didn't_ know.

Laura waited a year for Grant Ledwith's salary to be raised to
marrying point; he was in a wholesale woolen house in Boston; he was
a handsome fellow, with gentlemanly and taking address,--capital,
this, for a young salesman; and they put his pay up to two thousand
dollars within that twelvemonth. Upon this, in the spring, they
married; took a house in Filbert Street, down by the river, and set
up their little gods. These were: a sprinkle of black walnut and
brocatelle in the drawing-room, a Sheffield-plate tea-service, and a
crimson-and-giltedged dinner set that Mrs. Oferr gave them; twilled
turkey-red curtains, that looked like thibet, in the best chamber;
and the twenty-four white skirts and the silk dresses, and whatever
corresponded to them on the bride-groom's part, in their wardrobes.
All that was left of Laura's money, and all that was given them by
Grant Ledwith's father, and Mr. Titus Oldways' astounding present of
three hundred dollars, without note or comment,--the first reminder
they had had of him since Edward Shiere's funeral, "and goodness
knew how he heard anything now," Aunt Oferr said,--had gone to this
outfit. But they were well set up and started in the world; so
everybody said, and so they, taking the world into their young,
confident hands for a plaything, not knowing it for the perilous
loaded shell it is, thought, merrily, themselves.

Up in Homesworth people did not have to wait for two thousand dollar
salaries. They would not get them if they did.

Oliver Ripwinkley, the minister's son, finished his medical studies
and city hospital practice that year, and came back, as he had
always said he should do, to settle down for a country doctor. Old
Doctor Parrish, the parson's friend of fifty years, with no child of
his own, kept the place for Oliver, and hung up his old-fashioned
saddle-bags in the garret the very day the young man came home. He
was there to be "called in," however, and with this backing, and the
perforce of there being nobody else, young Doctor Ripwinkley had ten
patients within the first week; thereby opportunity for shewing
himself in the eyes of ten families as a young man who "appeared to
know pretty well what he was about."

So that when he gave further proof of the same, by asking, within
the week that followed, the prettiest girl in Homesworth, Frances
Shiere, to come and begin the world with him at Mile Hill village,
nobody, not even Frank herself, was astonished.

She bought three new gowns, a shawl, a black silk mantle, and a
straw bonnet. She made six each of every pretty white garment that a
woman wears; and one bright mellow evening in September, they took
their first tea in the brown-carpeted, white-shaded little corner
room in the old "Rankin house;" a bigger place than they really
wanted yet, and not all to be used at first; but rented
"reasonable," central, sunshiny, and convenient; a place that they
hoped they should buy sometime; facing on the broad sidegreen of the
village street, and running back, with its field and meadow
belongings, away to the foot of great, gray, sheltering Mile Hill.

And the vast, solemn globe, heedless of what lit here or there upon
its breadth, or took up this or that life in its little freckling
cities, or between the imperceptible foldings of its hills,--only
carrying way-passengers for the centuries,--went plunging on its
track, around and around, and swept them all, a score of times,
through its summer and its winter solstices.




IV.

AFTERWARDS IS A LONG TIME.


Old Mr. Marmaduke Wharne had come down from Outledge, in the
mountains, on his way home to New York. He had stopped in Boston to
attend to some affairs of his own,--if one can call them so, since
Marmaduke Wharne never had any "own" affairs that did not chiefly
concern, to their advantage, somebody else,--in which his friend Mr.
Titus Oldways was interested, not personally, but Wharne fashion.
Now, reader, you know something about Mr. Titus Oldways, which up to
this moment, only God, and Marmaduke Wharne, and Rachel Froke, who
kept Mr. Oldways' house, and wore a Friend's drab dress and white
cap, and said "Titus," and "Marmaduke" to the two old gentlemen, and
"thee" and "thou" to everybody,--have ever known. In a general way
and relation, I mean; separate persons knew particular things; but
each separate person thought the particular thing he knew to be a
whimsical exception.

Mr. Oldways did not belong to any church: but he had an English
Prayer-book under his Bible on his study table, and Baxter and
Fenelon and à Kempis and "Wesley's Hymns," and Swedenborg's "Heaven
and Hell" and "Arcana Celestia," and Lowell's "Sir Launfal," and
Dickens's "Christmas Carol," all on the same set of shelves,--that
held, he told Marmaduke, his religion; or as much of it as he could
get together. And he had this woman, who was a Friend, and who
walked by the Inner Light, and in outer charity, if ever a woman
did, to keep his house. "For," said he, "the blessed truth is, that
the Word of God is in the world. Alive in it. When you know that,
and wherever you can get hold of his souls, then and there you've
got your religion,--a piece at a time. To prove and sort your
pieces, and to straighten the tangle you might otherwise get into,
there's _this_," and he laid his hand down on the Four Gospels,
bound in white morocco, with a silver cross upon the cover,--a
volume that no earthly creature, again, knew of, save Titus and
Marmaduke and Rachel Froke, who laid it into a drawer when she swept
and dusted, and placed it between the crimson folds of its quilted
silken wrapper when she had finished, burnishing the silver cross
gently with a scrap of chamois leather cut from a clean piece every
time. There was nothing else delicate and exquisite in all the plain
and grim establishment; and the crimson wrapper was comfortably
worn, and nobody would notice it, lying on the table there, with an
almanac, a directory, the big, open Worcester's Dictionary, and the
scattered pamphlets and newspapers of the day.

Out in the world, Titus Oldways went about with visor down.

He gave to no fairs nor public charities; "let them get all they
could that way, it wasn't his way," he said to Rachel Froke. The
world thought he gave nothing, either of purse or life.

There was a plan they had together,--he and Marmaduke Wharne,--this
girls' story-book will not hold the details nor the idea of
it,--about a farm they owned, and people working it that could go
nowhere else to work anything; and a mill-privilege that might be
utilized and expanded, to make--not money so much as safe and honest
human life by way of making money; and they sat and talked this plan
over, and settled its arrangements, in the days that Marmaduke
Wharne was staying on in Boston, waiting for his other friend, Miss
Craydocke, who had taken the River Road down from Outledge, and so
come round by Z----, where she was staying a few days with the
Goldthwaites and the Inglesides. Miss Craydocke had a share or two
in the farm and in the mill.

And now, Titus Oldways wanted to know of Marmaduke Wharne what he
was to do for Afterwards.

It was a question that had puzzled and troubled him. Afterwards.

"While I live," he said, "I will do what I can, and _as_ I can. I
will hand over my doing, and the wherewith, to no society or
corporation. I'll pay no salaries nor circumlocutions. Neither will
I--afterwards. And how is my money going to work on?"

"_Your_ money?"

"Well,--God's money."

"How did it work when it came to you?"

Mr. Oldways was silent.

"He chose to send it to you. He made it in the order of things that
it should come to you. You began, yourself, to work for money. You
did not understand, then, that the money would be from God and was
for Him."

"He made me understand."

"Yes. He looked out for that part of it too. He can look out for it
again. His word shall not return unto him void."

"He has given me this, though, to pass on; and I will not put it
into a machine. I want to give some living soul a body for its
living. Dead charities are dead. It's of no use to will it to you,
Marmaduke; I'm as likely to stay on, perhaps, as you are."

"And the youngest life might drop, the day after your own. You can't
take it out of God's hand."

"I must either let it go by law, or will it--here and there. I know
enough whom it would help; but I want to invest, not spend it; to
invest it in a life--or lives--that will carry it on from where I
leave it. How shall I know?"

"He giveth it a body as it pleaseth Him," quoted Marmaduke Wharne,
thoughtfully. "I am English, you know, Oldways; I can't help
reverencing the claims of next of kin. Unless one is plainly shown
otherwise, it seems the appointment. How can we set aside his ways
until He clearly points us out his own exception?"

"My 'next' are two women whom I don't know, my niece's children. She
died thirty years ago."

"Perhaps you ought to know them."

"I know _about_ them; I've kept the run; but I've held clear of
family. They didn't need me, and I had no right to put it into their
heads they did, unless I fully meant"--

He broke off.

"They're like everybody else, Wharne; neither better nor worse, I
dare say; but the world is full of just such women. How do I know
this money would be well in their hands--even for themselves?"

"Find out."

"One of 'em was brought up by an Oferr woman!"

The tone in which he _commonized_ the name to a satiric general
term, is not to be written down, and needed not to be interpreted.

"The other is well enough," he went on, "and contented enough.
A doctor's widow, with a little property, a farm and two
children,--her older ones died very young,--up in New Hampshire. I
might spoil _her_; and the other,--well, you see as I said, I _don't
know_."

"Find out," said Marmaduke Wharne, again.

"People are not found out till they are tried."

"Try 'em!"

Mr. Oldways had been sitting with his head bent, thoughtfully, his
eyes looking down, his hands on the two stiff, old-fashioned arms of
his chair. At this last spondaic response from Marmaduke, he lifted
his eyes and eyebrows,--not his head,--and raised himself slightly
with his two hands pressing on the chair arms; the keen glance and
the half-movement were impulsively toward his friend.

"Eh?" said he.

"Try 'em," repeated Marmaduke Wharne. "Give God's way a chance."

Mr. Oldways, seated back in his chair again, looked at him intently;
made a little vibration, as it were, with his body, that moved his
head up and down almost imperceptibly, with a kind of gradual
assenting apprehension, and kept utterly silent.

So, their talk being palpably over for this time, Marmaduke Wharne
got up presently to go. They nodded at each other, friendlily, as he
looked back from the door.

Left alone, Mr. Titus Oldways turned in his swivel-chair, around to
his desk beside which he was sitting.

"Next of kin?" he repeated to himself. "God's way?--Well! Afterwards
is a long time. A man must give it up somewhere. Everything escheats
to the king at last."

And he took a pen in his hand and wrote a letter.




V.

HOW THE NEWS CAME TO HOMESWORTH.


"I wish I lived in the city, and had a best friend," said Hazel
Ripwinkley to Diana, as they sat together on the long, red, sloping
kitchen roof under the arches of the willow-tree, hemming towels for
their afternoon "stent." They did this because their mother sat on
the shed roof under the fir, when she was a child, and had told them
of it. Imagination is so much greater than fact, that these
children, who had now all that little Frank Shiere had dreamed of
with the tar smell and the gravel stones and the one tree,--who
might run free in the wide woods and up the breezy hillsides,--liked
best of all to get out on the kitchen roof and play "old times," and
go back into their mother's dream.

"I wish I lived in a block of houses, and could see across the
corner into my best friend's room when she got up in the morning!"

"And could have that party!" said Diana.

"Think of the clean, smooth streets, with red sidewalks, and people
living all along, door after door! I like things set in rows, and
people having places, like the desks at school. Why, you've got to
go way round Sand Hill to get to Elizabeth Ann Dorridon's. I should
like to go up steps, and ring bells!"

"I don't know," said Diana, slowly. "I think birds that build little
nests about anywhere in the cunning, separate places, in the woods,
or among the bushes, have the best time."

"Birds, Dine! It ain't birds, it's people! What has that to do with
it?"

"I mean I think nests are better than martin-boxes."

"Let's go in and get her to tell us that story. She's in the round
room."

The round room was a half ellipse, running in against the curve of
the staircase. It was a bit of a place, with the window at one end,
and the bow at the other. It had been Doctor Ripwinkley's office,
and Mrs. Ripwinkley sat there with her work on summer afternoons.
The door opened out, close at the front, upon a great flat stone in
an angle, where was also entrance into the hall by the house-door,
at the right hand. The door of the office stood open, and across the
stone one could look down, between a range of lilac bushes and the
parlor windows, through a green door-yard into the street.

"Now, Mother Frank, tell us about the party!"

They called her "Mother Frank" when they wished to be particularly
coaxing. They had taken up their father's name for her, with their
own prefix, when they were very little ones, before he went away and
left nobody to call her Frank, every day, any more.

"That same little old story? Won't you ever be tired of it,--you
great girls?" asked the mother; for she had told it to them ever
since they were six and eight years old.

"Yes! No, never!" said the children.

For how _should_ they outgrow it? It was a sunny little bit out of
their mother's own child-life. We shall go back to smaller things,
one day, maybe, and find them yet more beautiful. It is the _going_
back, together.

"The same old way?"

"Yes; the very same old way."

"We had little open-work straw hats and muslin pelisses,--your Aunt
Laura and I,"--began Mrs. Ripwinkley, as she had begun all those
scores of times before. "Mother put them on for us,--she dressed us
just alike, always,--and told us to take each other's hands, and go
up Brier and down Hickory streets, and stop at all the houses that
she named, and that we knew; and we were to give her love and
compliments, and ask the mothers in each house,--Mrs. Dayton, and
Mrs. Holridge (she lived up the long steps), and Mrs. Waldow, and
the rest of them, to let Caroline and Grace and Fanny and Susan, and
the rest of _them_, come at four o'clock, to spend the afternoon and
take tea, if it was convenient."

"O, mother!" said Hazel, "you didn't say that when you _asked_
people, you know."

"O, no!" said Mrs. Ripwinkley. "That was when we went to stop a
little while ourselves, without being asked. Well, it was to please
to let them come. And all the ladies were at home, because it was
only ten o'clock; and they all sent their love and compliments, and
they were much obliged, and the little girls would be very happy.

"It was a warm June day; up Brier Street was a steep walk; down
Hickory we were glad to keep on the shady side, and thought it was
nice that Mrs. Bemys and Mrs. Waldow lived there. The strings of our
hats were very moist and clinging when we got home, and Laura had a
blue mark under her chin from the green ribbon.

"Mother was in her room, in her white dimity morning gown, with
little bows up the front, the ends trimmed with cambric edging. She
took off our hats and our pelisses,--the tight little sleeves came
off wrong side out,--sponged our faces with cool water, and brushed
out Laura's curls. That was the only difference between us. I
hadn't any curls, and my hair had to be kept cropped. Then she went
to her upper bureau drawer and took out two little paper boxes.

"'Something has come for Blanche and Clorinda, since you have been
gone,' she said, smiling. 'I suppose you have been shopping?' We
took the paper boxes, laughing back at her with a happy
understanding. We were used to these little plays of mother's, and
she couldn't really surprise us with her kindnesses. We went and sat
down in the window-seat, and opened them as deliberately and in as
grown-up a way as we could. Inside them were two little lace
pelerines lined with rose-colored silk. The boxes had a faint smell
of musk. The things were so much better for coming in boxes! Mother
knew that.

"Well, we dressed our dolls, and it was a great long sunshiny
forenoon. Mother and Luclarion had done something in the kitchen,
and there was a smell of sweet baking in the house. Every now and
then we sniffed, and looked at each other, and at mother, and
laughed. After dinner we had on our white French calicoes with blue
sprigs, and mother said she should take a little nap, and we might
go into the parlor and be ready for our company. She always let us
receive our own company ourselves at first. And exactly at four
o'clock the door-bell rang, and they began to come.

"Caroline and Fanny Dayton had on white cambric dresses, and green
kid slippers. That was being very much dressed, indeed. Lucy Waldow
wore a pink lawn, and Grace Holridge a buff French print. Susan
Bemys said her little sister couldn't come because they couldn't
find her best shoes. Her mother thought she had thrown them out of
the window.

"When they all got there we began to play 'Lady Fair;' and we had
just got all the 'lady fairs,' one after another, into our ring, and
were dancing and singing up and down and round and round, when the
door opened and mother walked in.

"We always thought our mother was the prettiest of any of the girls'
mothers. She had such bright shining hair, and she put it up with
shell combs into such little curly puffs. And she never seemed fussy
or old, but she came in among us with such a beautiful, smiling way,
as if she knew beforehand that it was all right, and there was no
danger of any mischief, or that we shouldn't behave well, but she
only wanted to see the good time. That day she had on a white muslin
dress with little purple flowers on it, and a bow of purple ribbon
right in the side of her hair. She had a little piece of fine work
in her hand, and after she had spoken to all the little girls and
asked them how their mothers were, she went and sat down in one of
the front windows, and made little scollops and eyelets. I remember
her long ivory stiletto, with a loop of green ribbon through the
head of it, and the sharp, tiny, big-bowed scissors that lay in her
lap, and the bright, tapering silver thimble on her finger.

"Pretty soon the door opened again, softly; a tray appeared, with
Hannah behind it. On the tray were little glass saucers with
confectionery in them; old-fashioned confectionery,--gibraltars, and
colored caraways, and cockles with mottoes. We were in the middle of
'So says the Grand Mufti,' and Grace Holridge was the Grand Mufti.
Hannah went up to her first, as she stood there alone, and Grace
took a saucer and held it up before the row of us, and said, '_Thus_
says the Grand Mufti!' and then she bit a red gibraltar, and
everybody laughed. She did it so quickly and so prettily, putting
it right into the play. It was good of her not to say, '_So_ says
the Grand Mufti.' At least we thought so then, though Susan Bemys
said it would have been funnier.

"We had a great many plays in those days, and it took a long
afternoon to get through with them. We had not begun to wonder what
we should do next, when tea time came, and we went down into the
basement room. It wasn't tea, though; it was milk in little clear,
pink mugs, some that mother only had out for our parties, and cold
water in crimped-edge glasses, and little biscuits, and
sponge-cakes, and small round pound-cakes frosted. These were what
had smelt so good in the morning.

"We stood round the table; there was not room for all of us to sit,
and mother helped us, and Hannah passed things round. Susan Bemys
took cake three times, and Lucy Waldow opened her eyes wide, and
Fanny Dayton touched me softly under the table.

"After tea mother played and sung some little songs to us; and then
she played the 'Fisher's Hornpipe' and 'Money Musk,' and we danced a
little contra-dance. The girls did not all know cotillons, and some
of them had not begun to go to dancing-school. Father came home and
had his tea after we had done ours, and then he came up into the
parlor and watched us dancing. Mr. Dayton came in, too. At about
half past eight some of the other fathers called, and some of the
mothers sent their girls, and everybody was fetched away. It was
nine o'clock when Laura and I went to bed, and we couldn't go to
sleep until after the clock struck ten, for thinking and saying what
a beautiful time we had had, and anticipating how the girls would
talk it all over next day at school. That," said Mrs. Ripwinkley,
when she had finished, "was the kind of a party we used to have in
Boston when I was a little girl. I don't know what the little girls
have now."

"Boston!" said Luclarion, catching the last words as she came in,
with her pink cape bonnet on, from the Homesworth variety and
finding store, and post-office. "You'll talk them children off to
Boston, finally, Mrs. Ripwinkley! Nothing ever tugs so at one end,
but there's something tugging at the other; and there's never a hint
nor a hearing to anybody, that something more doesn't turn up
concerning it. Here's a letter, Mrs. Ripwinkley!"

Mrs. Ripwinkley took it with some surprise. It was not her sister's
handwriting nor Mr. Ledwith's, on the cover; and she rarely had a
letter from them that was posted in Boston, now. They had been
living at a place out of town for several years. Mrs. Ledwith knew
better than to give her letters to her husband for posting. They got
lost in his big wallet, and stayed there till they grew old.

Who should write to Mrs. Ripwinkley, after all these years, from
Boston?

She looked up at Luclarion, and smiled. "It didn't take a Solomon,"
said she, pointing to the postmark.

"No, nor yet a black smooch, with only four letters plain, on an
invelup. 'Taint that, it's the drift of things. Those girls have got
Boston in their minds as hard and fast as they've got heaven; and I
mistrust mightily they'll get there first somehow!"

The girls were out of hearing, as she said this; they had got their
story, and gone back to their red roof and their willow tree.

"Why, Luclarion!" exclaimed Mrs. Ripwinkley, as she drew out and
unfolded the letter sheet. "It's from Uncle Titus Oldways."

"Then he ain't dead," remarked Luclarion, and went away into the
kitchen.

     "MY DEAR FRANCES,--I am seventy-eight years old. It is time I
     got acquainted with some of my relations. I've had other work
     to do in the world heretofore (at least I thought I had), and
     so, I believe, have they. But I have a wish now to get you and
     your sister to come and live nearer to me, that we may find out
     whether we really are anything to each other or not. It seems
     natural, I suppose, that we might be; but kinship doesn't all
     run in the veins.

     "I do not ask you to do this with reference to any possible
     intentions of mine that might concern you after my death; my
     wish is to do what is right by you, in return for your
     consenting to my pleasure in the matter, while I am alive. It
     will cost you more to live in Boston than where you do now, and
     I have no business to expect you to break up and come to a new
     home unless I can make it an object to you in some way. You can
     do some things for your children here that you could not do in
     Homesworth. I will give you two thousand dollars a year to live
     on, and secure the same to you if I die. I have a house here in
     Aspen Street, not far from where I live myself, which I will
     give to either of you that it may suit. That you can settle
     between you when you come. It is rather a large house, and Mrs.
     Ledwith's family is larger, I think, than yours. The estate is
     worth ten thousand dollars, and I will give the same sum to the
     one who prefers, to put into a house elsewhere. I wish you to
     reckon this as all you are ever to expect from me, except the
     regard I am willing to believe I may come to have for you. I
     shall look to hear from you by the end of the week.

                "I remain, yours truly,

                           "TITUS OLDWAYS."

"Luclarion!" cried Mrs. Ripwinkley, with excitement, "come here and
help me think!"

"Only four days to make my mind up in," she said again, when
Luclarion had read the letter through.

Luclarion folded it and gave it back.

"It won't take God four days to think," she answered quietly; "and
you can ask _Him_ in four minutes. You and I can talk afterwards."
And Luclarion got up and went away a second time into the kitchen.

That night, after Diana and Hazel were gone to bed, their mother and
Luclarion Grapp had some last words about it, sitting by the
white-scoured kitchen table, where Luclarion had just done mixing
bread and covered it away for rising. Mrs. Ripwinkley was apt to
come out and talk things over at this time of the kneading. She
could get more from Luclarion then than at any other opportunity.
Perhaps that was because Miss Grapp could not walk off from the
bread-trough; or it might be that there was some sympathy between
the mixing of her flour and yeast into a sweet and lively
perfection, and the bringing of her mental leaven wholesomely to
bear.

"It looks as if it were meant, Luclarion," said Mrs. Ripwinkley, at
last. "And just think what it will be for the children."

"I guess it's meant fast enough," replied Luclarion. "But as for
what it will be for the children,--why, that's according to what you
all make of it. And that's the stump."

Luclarion Grapp was fifty-four years old; but her views of life were
precisely the same that they had been at twenty-eight.




VI.

AND.


There is a piece of Z----, just over the river, that they call
"And."

It began among the school-girls; Barbara Holabird had christened it,
with the shrewdness and mischief of fourteen years old. She said the
"and-so-forths" lived there.

It was a little supplementary neighborhood; an after-growth, coming
up with the railroad improvements, when they got a freight station
established on that side for the East Z---- mills. "After Z----,
what should it be but 'And?'" Barbara Holabird wanted to know. The
people who lived there called it East Square; but what difference
did that make?

It was two miles Boston-ward from Z---- centre, where the down
trains stopped first; that was five minutes gained in the time
between it and the city. Land was cheap at first, and sure to come
up in value; so there were some streets laid out at right angles,
and a lot of houses put up after a pattern, as if they had all been
turned out of blanc-mange moulds, and there was "East Square." Then
people began by-and-by to build for themselves, and a little variety
and a good deal of ambition came in. They had got to French roofs
now; this was just before the day of the multitudinous little paper
collar-boxes with beveled covers, that are set down everywhere now,
and look as if they could be lifted up by the chimneys, any time,
and be carried off with a thumb and finger. Two and a half story
houses, Mansarded, looked grand; and the East Square people thought
nothing slight of themselves, though the "old places" and the real
Z---- families were all over on West Hill.

Mrs. Megilp boarded in And for the summer.

"Since Oswald had been in business she couldn't go far from the
cars, you know; and Oswald had a boat on the river, and he and
Glossy enjoyed that so much. Besides, she had friends in Z----,
which made it pleasant; and she was tired, for her part, of crowds
and fashion. All she wanted was a quiet country place. She knew the
Goldthwaites and the Haddens; she had met them one year at
Jefferson."

Mrs. Megilp had found out that she could get larger rooms in And
than she could have at the mountains or the sea-shore, and at half
the price; but this she did not mention. Yet there was nothing
shabby in it, except her carefully _not_ mentioning it.

Mrs. Megilp was Mrs. Grant Ledwith's chief intimate and counselor.
She was a good deal the elder; that was why it was mutually
advantageous. Grant Ledwith was one of the out-in-the-world,
up-to-the-times men of the day; the day in which everything is
going, and everybody that is in active life has, somehow or other,
all that is going. Grant Ledwith got a good salary, an inflated
currency salary; and he spent it all. His daughters were growing up,
and they were stylish and pretty; Mrs. Megilp took a great interest
in Agatha and Florence Ledwith, and was always urging their mother
to "do them justice." "Agatha and Florence were girls who had a
right to every advantage." Mrs. Megilp was almost old enough to be
Laura Ledwith's mother; she had great experience, and knowledge of
the world; and she sat behind Laura's conscience and drove it tandem
with her inclination.

Per contra, it was nice for Mrs. Megilp, who was a widow, and whose
income did not stretch with the elasticity of the times, to have
friends who lived like the Ledwiths, and who always made her
welcome; it was a good thing for Glossy to be so fond of Agatha and
Florence, and to have them so fond of her. "She needed young
society," her mother said. One reason that Glossy Megilp needed
young society might be in the fact that she herself was twenty-six.

Mrs. Megilp had advised the Ledwiths to buy a house in Z----. "It
was just far enough not to be suburban, but to have a society of its
own; and there _was_ excellent society in Z----, everybody knew.
Boston was hard work, nowadays; the distances were getting to be so
great." Up to the West and South Ends,--the material distances,--she
meant to be understood to say; but there was an inner sense to Mrs.
Megilp's utterances, also.

"One might as well be quite out of town; and then it was always
something, even in such city connection as one might care to keep
up, to hail from a well-recognized social independency; to belong to
Z---- was a standing, always. It wasn't like going to Forest Dell,
or Lakegrove, or Bellair; cheap little got-up places with fancy
names, that were strung out on the railroads like French gilt beads
on a chain."

But for all that, Mrs. Ledwith had only got into "And;" and Mrs.
Megilp knew it.

Laura did not realize it much; she had bowing and speaking
acquaintance with the Haddens and the Hendees, and even with the
Marchbankses, over on West Hill; and the Goldthwaites and the
Holabirds, down in the town, she knew very well. She did not care to
come much nearer; she did not want to be bound by any very
stringent and exclusive social limits; it was a bother to keep up
to all the demands of such a small, old-established set. Mrs. Hendee
would not notice, far less be impressed by the advent of her
new-style Brussels carpet with a border, or her full, fresh,
Nottingham lace curtains, or the new covering of her drawing-room
set with cuir-colored terry. Mrs. Tom Friske and Mrs. Philgry, down
here at East Square, would run in, and appreciate, and admire, and
talk it all over, and go away perhaps breaking the tenth commandment
amiably in their hearts.

Mrs. Ledwith's nerves had extended since we saw her as a girl; they
did not then go beyond the floating ends of her blue or rose-colored
ribbons, or, at furthest, the tip of her jaunty laced sunshade; now
they ramified,--for life still grows in some direction,--to her
chairs, and her china, and her curtains, and her ruffled
pillow-shams. Also, savingly, to her children's "suits," and party
dresses, and pic-nic hats, and double button gloves. Savingly; for
there is a leaven of grace in mother-care, even though it be
expended upon these. Her friend, Mrs. Inchdeepe, in Helvellyn Park,
with whom she dined when she went shopping in Boston, had _nothing_
but her modern improvements and her furniture. "My house is my
life," she used to say, going round with a Canton crape duster,
touching tenderly carvings and inlayings and gildings.

Mrs. Megilp was spending the day with Laura Ledwith; Glossy was gone
to town, and thence down to the sea-shore, with some friends.

Mrs. Megilp spent a good many days with Laura. She had large, bright
rooms at her boarding-house, but then she had very gristly veal pies
and thin tapioca puddings for dinner; and Mrs. Megilp's constitution
required something more generous. She was apt to happen in at this
season, when Laura had potted pigeons. A little bird told her; a
dozen little birds, I mean, with their legs tied together in a
bunch; for she could see the market wagon from her window, when it
turned up Mr. Ledwith's avenue.

Laura had always the claret pitcher on her dinner table, too; and
claret and water, well-sugared, went deliciously with the savory
stew.

They were up-stairs now, in Laura's chamber; the bed and sofa were
covered with silk and millinery; Laura was looking over the girls'
"fall things;" there was a smell of sweet marjoram and thyme and
cloves, and general richness coming up from the kitchen; there was a
bland sense of the goodness of Providence in Mrs. Megilp's--no, not
heart, for her heart was not very hungry; but in her eyes and
nostrils.

She was advising Mrs. Ledwith to take Desire and Helena's two green
silks and make them over into one for Helena.

"You can get two whole back breadths then, by piecing it up under
the sash; and you _can't_ have all those gores again; they are quite
done with. Everybody puts in whole breadths now. There's just as
much difference in the _way_ of goring a skirt, as there is between
gores and straight selvages."

"They do hang well, though; they have such a nice slope."

"Yes,--but the stripes and the seams! Those tell the story six rods
off; and then there _must_ be sashes, or postillions, or something;
they don't make anything without them; there isn't any finish to a
round waist unless you have something behind."

"They wore belts last year, and I bought those expensive gilt
buckles. I'm sure they used to look sweetly. But there! a fashion
doesn't last nowadays while you're putting a thing on and walking
out of the house!"

"And don't put in more than three plaits," pursued Mrs. Megilp,
intent on the fate of the green silks. "Everything is gathered; you
see that is what requires the sashes; round waists and gathers have
a queer look without."

"If you once begin to alter, you've got to make all over," said Mrs.
Ledwith, a little fractiously, putting the scissors in with
unwilling fingers. She knew there was a good four days' work before
her, and she was quick with her needle, too.

"Never mind; the making over doesn't cost anything; you turn off
work so easily; and then you've got a really stylish thing."

"But with all the ripping and remodelling, I don't get time to turn
round, myself, and _live_! It is all fall work, and spring work, and
summer work and winter work. One drive rushes pell-mell right over
another. There isn't time enough to make things and have them; the
good of them, I mean."

"The girls get it; we have to live in our children," said Mrs.
Megilp, self-renouncingly. "I can never rest until Glossy is
provided with everything; and you know, Laura, I _am_ obliged to
contrive."

Mrs. Megilp and her daughter Glaucia spent about a thousand dollars
a year, between them, on their dress. In these days, this is a
limited allowance--for the Megilps. But Mrs. Megilp was a woman of
strict pecuniary principle; the other fifteen hundred must pay all
the rest; she submitted cheerfully to the Divine allotment, and
punctually made the two ends meet. She will have this to show, when
the Lord of these servants cometh and reckoneth with them, and that
man who has been also in narrow circumstances, brings his nicely
kept talent out of his napkin.

Desire Ledwith, a girl of sixteen, spoke suddenly from a corner
where she sat with a book,--

"I do wonder who '_they_' are, mamma!"

"Who?" said Mrs. Ledwith, half rising from her chair, and letting
some breadths of silk slide down upon the floor from her lap, as she
glanced anxiously from the window down the avenue. She did not want
any company this morning.

"Not that, mamma; I don't mean anybody coming. The 'theys' that
wear, and don't wear, things; the theys you have to be just like,
and keep ripping and piecing for."

"You absurd child!" exclaimed Mrs. Ledwith, pettishly. "To make me
spill a whole lapful of work for that! They? Why, everybody, of
course."

"Everybody complains of them, though. Jean Friske says her mother is
all discouraged and worn out. There isn't a thing they had last year
that won't have to be made over this, because they put in a breadth
more behind, and they only gore side seams. And they don't wear
black capes or cloth sacks any more with all kinds of dresses; you
must have suits, clear through. It seems to me 'they' is a nuisance.
And if it's everybody, we must be part, of it. Why doesn't somebody
stop?"

"Desire, I wish you'd put away your book, and help, instead of
asking silly questions. You can't make the world over, with 'why
don'ts?'"

"I'll _rip_," said Desire, with a slight emphasis; putting her book
down, and coming over for a skirt and a pair of scissors. "But you
know I'm no good at putting together again. And about making the
world over, I don't know but that might be as easy as making over
all its clothes, I'd as lief try, of the two."

Desire was never cross or disagreeable; she was only
"impracticable," her mother said. "And besides that, she didn't know
what she really did want. She was born hungry and asking, with those
sharp little eyes, and her mouth always open while she was a baby.
'It was a sign,' the nurse said, when she was three weeks old. And
then the other sign,--that she should have to be called 'Desire!'"

Mrs. Megilp--for Mrs. Megilp had been in office as long ago as
that--had suggested ways of getting over or around the difficulty,
when Aunt Desire had stipulated to have the baby named for her, and
had made certain persuasive conditions.

"There's the pretty French turn you might give it,--'Desirée.' Only
one more 'e,' and an accent. That is so sweet, and graceful, and
distinguished!"

"But Aunt Desire won't have the name twisted. It is to be real,
plain Desire, or not at all."

Mrs. Megilp had shrugged her shoulders.

"Well, of course it can be that, to christen by, and marry by, and
be buried by. But between whiles,--people pick up names,--you'll
see!"

Mrs. Megilp began to call her "Daisy" when she was two years old.
Nobody could help what Mrs. Megilp took a fancy to call her by way
of endearment, of course; and Daisy she was growing to be in the
family, when one day, at seven years old, she heard Mrs. Megilp say
to her mother,--

"I don't see but that you've all got your _Desire_, after all. The
old lady is satisfied; and away up there in Hanover, what can it
signify to her? The child is 'Daisy,' practically, now, as long as
she lives."

The sharp, eager little gray eyes, so close together in the high,
delicate head, glanced up quickly at speaker and hearer.

"What old lady, mamma, away up in Hanover?"

"Your Aunt Desire, Daisy, whom you were named for. She lives in
Hanover. You are to go and see her there, this summer."

"Will she call me Daisy?"

The little difficulty suggested in this question had singularly
never occurred to Mrs. Ledwith before. Miss Desire Ledwith never
came down to Boston; there was no danger at home.

"No. She is old-fashioned, and doesn't like pet names. She will call
you Desire. That is your name, you know."

"Would it signify if she thought you called me Daisy?" asked the
child frowning half absently over her doll, whose arm she was
struggling to force into rather a tight sleeve of her own
manufacture.

"Well, perhaps she might not exactly understand. People always went
by their names when she was a child, and now hardly anybody does.
She was very particular about having you called for her, and you
_are_, you know. I always write 'Desire Ledwith' in all your books,
and--well, I always _shall_ write it so, and so will you. But you
can be Daisy when we make much of you here at home, just as Florence
is Flossie."

"No, I can't," said the little girl, very decidedly, getting up and
dropping her doll. "Aunt Desire, away up in Hanover, is thinking all
the time that there is a little Desire Ledwith growing up down here.
I don't mean to have her cheated. I'm going to went by my name, as
she did. Don't call me Daisy any more, all of you; for I shan't
come!"

The gray eyes sparkled; the whole little face scintillated, as it
were. Desire Ledwith had a keen, charged little face; and when
something quick and strong shone through it, it was as if somewhere
behind it there had been struck fire.

She was true to that through all the years after; going to school
with Mabels and Ethels and Graces and Ediths,--not a girl she knew
but had a pretty modern name,--and they all wondering at that stiff
little "Desire" of hers that she would go by. When she was twelve
years old, the old lady up in Hanover had died, and left her a gold
watch, large and old-fashioned, which she could only keep on a stand
in her room,--a good solid silver tea-set, and all her spoons, and
twenty-five shares in the Hanover Bank.

Mrs. Megilp called her Daisy, with gentle inadvertence, one day
after that. Desire lifted her eyes slowly at her, with no other
reply in her face, or else.

"You might please your mother now, I think," said Mrs. Megilp.
"There is no old lady to be troubled by it."

"A promise isn't ever dead, Mrs. Megilp," said Desire, briefly. "I
shall keep our words."

"After all," Mrs. Megilp said privately to the mother, "there is
something quietly aristocratic in an old, plain, family name. I
don't know that it isn't good taste in the child. Everybody
understands that it was a condition, and an inheritance."

Mrs. Megilp had taken care of that. She was watchful for the small
impressions she could make in behalf of her particular friends. She
carried about with her a little social circumference in which all
was preëminently as it should be.

But,--as I would say if you could not see it for yourself--this is
a digression. We will go back again.

"If it were any use!" said Desire, shaking out the deep plaits as
she unfastened them from the band. "But you're only a piece of
everybody after all. You haven't anything really new or particular
to yourself, when you've done. And it takes up so much time. Last
year, this was so pretty! _Isn't_ anything actually pretty in
itself, or can't they settle what it is? I should think they had
been at it long enough."

"Fashions never were so graceful as they are this minute," said Mrs.
Megilp. "Of course it is art, like everything else, and progress.
The world is getting educated to a higher refinement in it, every
day. Why, it's duty, child!" she continued, exaltedly. "Think what
the world would be if nobody cared. We ought to make life beautiful.
It's meant to be. There's not only no virtue in ugliness, but almost
no virtue _with_ it, I think. People are more polite and
good-natured when they are well dressed and comfortable."

"_That's_ dress, too, though," said Desire, sententiously. "You've
got to stay at home four days, and rip, and be tired, and cross, and
tried-on-to, and have no chance to do anything else, before you can
put it all on and go out and be good-natured and bland, and help put
the beautiful face on the world, _one_ day. I don't believe it's
political economy."

"Everybody doesn't have to do it for themselves. Really, when I hear
people blamed for dress and elegance,--why, the very ones who have
the most of it are those who sacrifice the least time to it. They
just go and order what they want, and there's the end of it. When it
comes home, they put it on, and it might as well be a flounced silk
as a plain calico."

"But we _do_ have to think, Mrs. Megilp. And work and worry. And
then we _can't_ turn right round in the things we know every stitch
of and have bothered over from beginning to end, and just be lilies
of the field!"

"A great many people do have to wash their own dishes, and sweep,
and scour; but that is no reason it ought not to be done. I always
thought it was rather a pity that was said, _just so_," Mrs. Megilp
proceeded, with a mild deprecation of the Scripture. "There _is_
toiling and spinning; and will be to the end of time, for some of
us."

"There's cauliflower brought for dinner, Mrs. Ledwith," said
Christina, the parlor girl, coming in. "And Hannah says it won't go
with the pigeons. Will she put it on the ice for to-morrow?"

"I suppose so," said Mrs. Ledwith, absently, considering a breadth
that had a little hitch in it. "Though what we shall have to-morrow
I'm sure I don't know," she added, rousing up. "I wish Mr. Ledwith
wouldn't send home the first thing he sees, without any reference."

"And here's the milkman's bill, and a letter," continued Christina,
laying them down on a chair beside her mistress, and then departing.

Great things come into life so easily, when they do come, right
alongside of milk-bills and cabbages! And yet one may wait so long
sometimes for anything to happen _but_ cabbages!

The letter was in a very broad, thick envelope, and sealed with wax.

Mrs. Ledwith looked at it curiously before she opened it. She
did not receive many letters. She had very little time for
correspondence. It was addressed to "Mrs. Laura Ledwith." That
was odd and unusual, too.

Mrs. Megilp glanced at her over the tortoise-shell rims of her
eye-glasses, but sat very quiet, lest she should delay the opening.
She would like to know what could be in that very business-like
looking despatch, and Laura would be sure to tell her. It must be
something pretty positive, one way or another; it was no
common-place negative communication. Laura might have had property
left her. Mrs. Megilp always thought of possibilities like that.

When Laura Ledwith had unfolded the large commercial sheet, and
glanced down the open lines of square, upright characters, whose
purport could be taken in at sight, like print, she turned very red
with a sudden excitement. Then all the color dropped away, and there
was nothing in her face but blank, pale, intense surprise.

"It is a most _won_derful thing!" said she, at last, slowly; and her
breath came like a gasp with her words. "My great-uncle, Mr.
Oldways."

She spoke those four words as if from them Mrs. Megilp could
understand everything.

Mrs. Megilp thought she did.

"Ah! Gone?" she asked, pathetically.

"Gone! No, indeed!" said Mrs. Ledwith. "He wrote the letter. He
wants me to _come_; me, and all of us,--to Boston, to live; and to
get acquainted with him."

"My dear," said Mrs. Megilp, with the promptness and benignity of a
Christian apostle, "it's your duty to go."

"And he offers me a house, and two thousand dollars a year."

"My dear," said Mrs. Megilp, "it is _emphatically_ your duty to go."

All at once something strange came over Laura Ledwith. She crumpled
the letter tight in her hands with a clutch of quick excitement, and
began to choke with a little sob, and to laugh at the same time.

"Don't give way!" cried Mrs. Megilp, coming to her and giving her a
little shake and a slap. "If you do once you will again, and you're
_not_ hystericky!"

"He's sent for Frank, too. Frank and I will be together again in
dear old Boston! But--we can't be children and sit on the shed any
more; and--it _isn't_ dear old Boston, either!"

And then Laura gave right up, and had a good cry for five minutes.
After that she felt better, and asked Mrs. Megilp how she thought a
house in Spiller Street would do.

But she couldn't rip any more of those breadths that morning.

Agatha and Florence came in from some calls at the Goldthwaites and
the Haddens, and the news was told, and they had their bonnets to
take off, and the dinner-bell rang, and the smell of the spicy
pigeon-stew came up the stairs, all together. And they went down,
talking fast; and one said "house," and another "carpets," and
another "music and German;" and Desire, trailing a breadth of green
silk in her hand that she had never let go since the letter was
read, cried out, "oratorios!" And nobody quite knew what they were
going down stairs for, or had presence of mind to realize the
pigeons, or help each other or themselves properly, when they got
there! Except Mrs. Megilp, who was polite and hospitable to them
all, and picked two birds in the most composed and elegant manner.

When the dessert was put upon the table, and Christina, confusedly
enlightened as to the family excitement, and excessively curious,
had gone away into the kitchen, Mrs. Ledwith said to Mrs. Megilp,--

"I'm not sure I should fancy Spiller Street, after all; it's a sort
of a corner. Westmoreland Street or Helvellyn Park might be nice. I
know people down that way,--Mrs. Inchdeepe."

"Mrs. Inchdeepe isn't exactly 'people,'" said Mrs. Megilp, in a
quiet way that implied more than grammar. "Don't get into 'And' in
Boston, Laura!--With such an addition to your income, and what your
uncle gives you toward a house, I don't see why you might not think
of Republic Avenue."

"We shall have plenty of thinking to do about everything," said
Laura.

"Mamma," said Agatha, insinuatingly, "I'm thinking, already; about
that rose-pink paper for my room. I'm glad now I didn't have it
here."

Agatha had been restless for white lace, and rose-pink, and a
Brussels carpet ever since her friend Zarah Thoole had come home
from Europe and furnished a morning-room.

All this time Mr. Grant Ledwith, quite unconscious of the impending
changes with which his family were so far advanced in imagination,
was busy among bales and samples in Devonshire Street. It got to be
an old story by the time the seven o'clock train was in, and he
reached home. It was almost as if it had all happened a year ago,
and they had been waiting for him to come home from Australia.

There was so much to explain to him that it was really hard to make
him understand, and to bring him up to the point from which they
could go on together.




VII.

WAKING UP.


The Ledwiths took apartments in Boston for a month. They packed away
the furniture they wanted to keep for upper rooms, in the attics of
their house at Z----. They had an auction of all the furniture of
their drawing-room, dining-room, library, and first floor of
sleeping-rooms. Then they were to let their house. Meanwhile, one
was to be fixed upon and fitted up in Boston. In all this Mrs.
Megilp advised, invaluably.

"It's of no use to move things," she said. "Three removes are as bad
as a fire; and nothing ever fits in to new places. Old wine and new
bottles, you know! Clear all off with a country auction. Everybody
comes, and they all fight for everything. Things bring more than
their original cost. Then you've nothing to do but order according
to your taste."

Mr. Oldways had invited both his nieces to his own house on their
arrival. But here again Mrs. Megilp advised,--so judiciously.

"There are too many of you; it would be a positive infliction. And
then you'll have all your running about and planning and calculating
to do, and the good old gentleman would think he had pulled half
Boston down about his ears. Your sister can go there; it would be
only generous and thoughtful to give way to her. There are only
three of them, and they are strange, you know, to every thing, and
wouldn't know which way to turn. I can put you in the way of rooms
at the Bellevue, exactly the thing, for a hundred and fifty a
month. No servants, you see; meals at the restaurant, and very good,
too. The Wedringtons are to give them up unexpectedly; going to
Europe; poor Mrs. Wedrington is so out of health. And about the
house; don't decide in a hurry; see what your uncle says, and your
sister. It's very likely she'll prefer the Aspen Street house; and
it _would_ be out of the way for you. Still it is not to be
_refused_, you know; of course it is very desirable in many
respects; roomy, old-fashioned, and a garden. I think your sister
will like those things; they're what she has been used to. If she
does, why it's all comfortably settled, and nobody refuses. It is so
ungracious to appear to object; a gift horse, you know."

"Not to be refused; only by no means to be taken; masterly
inactivity till somebody else is hooked; and then somebody else is
to be grateful for the preference. I wish Mrs. Megilp wouldn't shine
things up so; and that mother wouldn't go to her to black all her
boots!"

Desire said this in secret, indignant discomfort, to Helena, the
fourth in the family, her chum-sister. Helena did very well to talk
to; she heard anything; then she pranced round the room and chaffed
the canary.

"Chee! chee! chee! chiddle, iddle, iddle, iddle, e-e-ee! Where do
you keep all your noise and your breath? You're great, aren't you?
You do that to spite people that have to work up one note at a time.
You don't take it in away down under your belt, do you? You're not
particular about that. You don't know much, after all. You don't
know _how_ you do it. You aren't learning of Madame Caroletti. And
you haven't learned two quarters, any way. You were only just born
last spring. Set up! Tr-r-r-r-e-e-ee! I can do that myself. I don't
believe you've got an octave in you. Poh!"

Mrs. Ripwinkley came down from the country with a bonnet on that
had a crown, and with not a particle of a chignon. When she was
married, twenty-five years before, she wore a French twist,--her
hair turned up in waves from her neck as prettily as it did away
from her forehead,--and two thick coiled loops were knotted and
fastened gracefully at the top. She had kept on twisting her hair
so, all these years; and the rippling folds turned naturally under
her fingers into their places. The color was bright still, and it
had not thinned. Over her brows it parted richly, with no fuzz or
crimp; but a sweet natural wreathing look that made her face young.
Mrs. Ledwith had done hers over slate-pencils till she had burned it
off; and now tied on a friz, that came low down, for fashion's sake,
and left visible only a little bunch of puckers between her eyebrows
and the crowsfeet at the corners. The back of her head was weighted
down by an immense excrescence in a bag. Behind her ears were bare
places. Mrs. Ledwith began to look old-young. And a woman cannot get
into a worse stage of looks than that. Still, she was a showy
woman--a good exponent of the reigning style; and she was
handsome--she and her millinery--of an evening, or in the street.

When I began that last paragraph I meant to tell you what else Mrs.
Ripwinkley brought with her, down out of the country and the old
times; but hair takes up a deal of room. She brought down all her
dear old furniture. That is, it came after her in boxes, when she
had made up her mind to take the Aspen Street house.

"Why, that's the sofa Oliver used to lie down on when he came home
tired from his patients, and that's the rocking-chair I nursed my
babies in; and this is the old oak table we've sat round three times
a day, the family of us growing and thinning, as the time went on,
all through these years. It's like a communion table, now, Laura. Of
course such things had to come."

This was what she answered, when Laura ejaculated her amazement at
her having brought "old Homesworth truck" to Boston.

"You see it isn't the walls that make the home; we can go away from
them and not break our hearts, so long as our own goes with us. The
little things that we have used, and that have grown around us with
our living,--they are all of living that we can handle and hold on
to; and if I went to Spitzbergen, I should take as many of them as I
could."

The Aspen Street house just suited Mrs. Ripwinkley, and Diana, and
Hazel.

In the first place, it was wooden; built side to the street, so that
you went up a little paved walk, in a shade of trees, to get to the
door; and then the yard, on the right hand side as you came in, was
laid out in narrow walks between borders of blossoming plants. There
were vines against the brick end of the next building,--creepers and
morning-glories, and white and scarlet runners; and a little
martin-box was set upon a pole in the still, farther corner.

The rooms of the house were low, but large; and some of the windows
had twelve-paned sashes,--twenty-four to a window. Mrs. Ripwinkley
was charmed with these also. They were like the windows at Mile
Hill.

Mrs. Ledwith, although greatly relieved by her sister's prompt
decision for the house which she did _not_ want, felt it in her
conscience to remonstrate a little.

"You have just come down from the mountains, Frank, after your
twenty-five years' sleep; you've seen nothing by and by you will
think differently. This house is fearfully old-fashioned,
_fearfully_; and it's away down here on the wrong side of the hill.
You can never get up over Summit Street from here."

"We are used to hills, and walking."

"But I mean--that isn't all. There are other things you won't be
able to get over. You'll never shake off Aspen Street dust,--you nor
the children."

"I don't think it is dusty. It is quiet, and sheltered, and clean. I
like it ever so much," said Mrs. Ripwinkley.

"O, dear, you don't understand in the least! It's wicked to let you
go on so! You poor, dear, simple little old soul!"

"Never mind," said Mrs. Megilp. "It's all well enough for the
present. It pleases the old gentleman, you know; and after all he's
done, he ought to be pleased. One of you should certainly be in his
neighborhood. _He_ has been here from time immemorial; and any place
grows respectable by staying in it long enough--from _choice_.
Nobody will wonder at Mrs. Ripwinkley's coming here at his request.
And when she _does_ move, you see, she will know exactly what she is
about."

"I almost doubt if she ever _will_ know what she is about," said
Laura.

"In that case,--well,"--said Mrs. Megilp, and stopped, because it
really was not in the least needful to say more.

Mrs. Megilp felt it judicious, for many reasons, that Mrs.
Ripwinkley should he hidden away for awhile, to get that mountain
sleep out of her eyes, if it should prove possible; just as we rub
old metal with oil and put it by till the rust comes off.

The Ledwiths decided upon a house in Shubarton Place that would not
seem quite like taking old Uncle Titus's money and rushing away
with it as far as city limits would allow; and Laura really did wish
to have the comfort of her sister's society, in a cozy way, of
mornings, up in her room; that was her chief idea about it. There
were a good many times and things in which she scarcely expected
much companionship from Frank. She would not have said even to
herself, that Frank was rusty; and she would do her faithful and
good-natured best to rub her up; but there was an instinct with her
of the congruous and the incongruous; and she would not do her
Bath-brick polishing out on the public promenade.

They began by going together to the carpet stores and the paper
warehouses; but they ended in detailing themselves for separate
work; their ideas clashed ridiculously, and perpetually confused
each other. Frank remembered loyally her old brown sofa and chairs;
she would not have gay colors to put them out of countenance; for
even if she re-covered them, she said they should have the same old
homey complexion. So she chose a fair, soft buff, with a pattern of
brown leaves, for her parlor paper; Mrs. Ledwith, meanwhile,
plunging headlong into glories of crimson and garnet and gold.
Agatha had her blush pink, in panels, with heart-of-rose borders,
set on with delicate gilt beadings; you would have thought she was
going to put herself up, in a fancy-box, like a French _mouchoir_ or
a _bonbon_.

"Why _don't_ you put your old brown things all together in an
up-stairs room, and call it Mile Hill? You could keep it for old
times' sake, and sit there mornings; the house is big enough; and
then have furniture like other people's in the parlor?"

"You see it wouldn't be _me_." said Mrs. Ripwinkley, simply.

"They keep saying it 'looks,' and 'it looks,'" said Diana to her
mother, at home. "Why must everything _look_ somehow?"

"And every_body_, too," said Hazel. "Why, when we meet any one in
the street that Agatha and Florence know, the minute they have gone
by they say, 'She didn't look well to-day,' or, 'How pretty she did
look in that new hat!' And after the great party they went to at
that Miss Hitchler's, they never told a word about it except how
girls 'looked.' I wonder what they _did_, or where the good time
was. Seems to me people ain't living,--they are only just looking;
or _is_ this the same old Boston that you told about, and where are
the real folks, mother?"

"We shall find them," said Mrs. Ripwinkley, cheerily; "and the real
of these, too, when the outsides are settled. In the meantime, we'll
make our house say, and not look. Say something true, of course.
Things won't say anything else, you see; if you try to make them,
they don't speak out; they only stand in a dumb show and make
faces."

"That's looking!" said Hazel. "Now I know."

"How those children do grow!" said Mrs. Ripwinkley, as they went off
together. "Two months ago they were sitting out on the kitchen roof,
and coming to me to hear the old stories!"

"Transplantin'," said Luclarion. "That's done it."

At twelve and fourteen, Hazel and Diana could be simple as
birds,--simpler yet, as human children waiting for all things,--in
their country life and their little dreams of the world. Two months'
contact with people and things in a great city had started the life
that was in them, so that it showed what manner of growth it was to
be of.

And little Hazel Ripwinkley had got hold already of the small end of
a very large problem.

But she could not make it out that this was the same old Boston
that her mother had told about, or where the nice neighbors were
that would be likely to have little tea-parties for their children.




VIII.

EAVESDROPPING IN ASPEN STREET.


Some of the old builders,--not the _very_ old ones, for they built
nothing but rope-walks down behind the hill,--but some of those who
began to go northwest from the State House to live, made a pleasant
group of streets down there on the level stretching away to the
river, and called them by fresh, fragrant, country-suggesting
names. Names of trees and fields and gardens, fruits and blossoms;
and they built houses with gardens around them. In between the
blocks were deep, shady places; and the smell of flowers was tossed
back and forth by summer winds between the walls. Some nice old
people stayed on there, and a few of their descendants stay on there
still, though they are built in closely now, for the most part, and
coarse, common things have much intruded, and Summit Street
overshadows them with its palaces.

Here and there a wooden house, set back a little, like this of the
Ripwinkleys in Aspen Street, gives you a feeling of Boston in the
far back times, as you go by; and here and there, if you could get
into the life of the neighborhood, you might perhaps find a
household keeping itself almost untouched with change, though there
has been such a rush and surge for years up and over into the newer
and prouder places.

At any rate, Titus Oldways lived here in Greenley Street; and he
owned the Aspen Street house, and another over in Meadow Place, and
another in Field Court. He meant to stretch his control over them as
long as he could, and keep them for families; therefore he valued
them at such rates as they would bring for dwellings; he would not
sell or lease them for any kind of "improvements;" he would not have
their little door-yards choked up, or their larger garden spaces
destroyed, while he could help it.

Round in Orchard Street lived Miss Craydocke. She was away again,
now, staying a little while with the Josselyns in New York. Uncle
Titus told Mrs. Ripwinkley that when Miss Craydocke came back it
would be a neighborhood, and they could go round; now it was only
back and forth between them and him and Rachel Froke. There were
other people, too, but they would be longer finding them out.
"You'll know Miss Craydocke as soon as you see her; she is one of
those you always seem to have seen before."

Now Uncle Titus would not have said this to everybody; not even if
everybody had been his niece, and had come to live beside him.

Orchard Street is wide and sunny and pleasant; the river air comes
over it and makes it sweet; and Miss Craydocke's is a big, generous
house, of which she only uses a very little part herself, because
she lets the rest to nice people who want pleasant rooms and can't
afford to pay much rent; an old gentleman who has had a hard time in
the world, but has kept himself a gentleman through it all, and his
little cheery old lady-wife who puts her round glasses on and
stitches away at fine women's under-garments and flannel
embroideries, to keep things even, have the two very best rooms; and
a clergyman's widow, who copies for lawyers, and writes little
stories for children, has another; and two orphan sisters who keep
school have another; and Miss Craydocke calls her house the Beehive,
and buzzes up and down in it, and out and in, on little "seeing-to"
errands of care and kindness all day long, as never any queen-bee
did in any beehive before, but in a way that makes her more truly
queen than any sitting in the middle cell of state to be fed on
royal jelly. Behind the Beehive, is a garden, as there should be;
great patches of lily-of-the valley grow there that Miss Craydocke
ties up bunches from in the spring and gives away to little
children, and carries into all the sick rooms she knows of, and the
poor places. I always think of those lilies of the valley when I
think of Miss Craydocke. It seems somehow as if they were blooming
about her all the year through; and so they are, perhaps, invisibly.
The other flowers come in their season; the crocuses have been done
with first of all; the gay tulips and the snowballs have made the
children glad when they stopped at the gate and got them, going to
school. Miss Craydocke is always out in her garden at school-time.
By and by there are the tall white lilies, standing cool and serene
in the July heats; then Miss Craydocke is away at the mountains,
pressing ferns and drying grasses for winter parlors; but there is
somebody on duty at the garden dispensary always, and there are
flower-pensioners who know they may come in and take the gracious
toll.

Late in the autumn, the nasturtiums and verbenas and marigolds are
bright; and the asters quill themselves into the biggest globes they
can, of white and purple and rose, as if it were to make the last
glory the best, and to do the very utmost of the year. Then the
chrysanthemums go into the house and bloom there for Christmas-time.

There is nothing else like Miss Craydocke's house and garden, I do
believe, in all the city of the Three Hills. It is none too big for
her, left alone with it, the last of her family; the world is none
too big for her; she is glad to know it is all there. She has a use
for everything as fast as it comes, and a work to do for everybody,
as fast as she finds them out. And e