IT was a long, rough, sunlit stretch of stony turnpike that climbed across the flanks of a mountain range in Maine, and skirted a great forest for many miles, on its way to an upland farming-country near the Canada border.

As you ascended this road, on your right hand was a continuous wall of dull-hued evergreens, straggly pines and cedars, crowded closely and rising high above a thick underbrush. Behind this lay the vast, mysterious, silent wilderness. Here and there the emergence of a foamy, rushing river, or the entrance of a narrow corduroy road or trail, afforded a glimpse into its depths, and then you saw the slopes of hills and valleys, clad ever in one smoky, bluish veil of fir and pine.

On the other hand, where you could see through the roadside brush, you looked down the mountain slope to the plains below, where the brawling mountain streams quieted down into pleasant water-courses; where broad patches of meadow land and wheat field spread out from edges of the woods, and where, far, far off, clusters of farm-houses, and further yet, towns and villages, sent their smoke up above the hazy horizon.

It was a road of so much variety and sweep of view, as it kept its course along the boundary of the forest’s dateless antiquity, and yet in full view of the prosperous outposts of a well-established civilization, that the most calloused traveler might have been expected to look about him and take an interest in his surroundings. But the three people who drove slowly up this hill one August afternoon might have been passing through a tunnel for all the attention they paid to the shifting scene.

Their vehicle was a farm-wagon; a fine, fresh-painted Concord wagon. The horses that drew it were large, sleek, and a little too fat. A comfortable country prosperity appeared in the whole outfit; and, although the raiment of the three travelers was unfashionably plain, they all three had an aspect of robust health and physical well-being, which was much at variance with their dismal countenances—for the middle-aged man who was driving looked sheepish and embarrassed; the good-looking, sturdy young fellow by his side was clearly in a state of frank, undisguised dejection, and the black-garbed woman, who sat behind in a splint-bottomed chair, had the extra-hard granite expression of the New England woman who particularly disapproves of something; whether that something be the destruction of her life’s best hopes or her neighbor’s method of making pie.

For mile after mile they jogged along in silence. Occasionally the elder man would make some brief and commonplace remark in a tentative way, as though to start a conversation. To these feeble attempts the young man made no response whatever. The woman in black sometimes nodded and sometimes said “Yes?” with a rising inflection, which is a form of torture invented and much practiced in the New England States.

The woman did not alter her rigid attitude, and kept her eyes cast down; but the passing of the stage awakened a noticeable interest in the two men on the front seat. The elder gazed with surprise and curiosity at the freight that the top of the stage-coach bore—three or four traveling trunks of unusual size, shape and color, clamped with iron and studded with heavy nails.

“Be them trunks?” he inquired, staring open-mouthed at the sight. “I never seen trunks like them before.”

When Samantha Spaulding was left a widow with a little boy, she got, as one of her neighbors expressed it, “more politeness than pity.” In truth, in so far as the condition has any luck about it, Samantha was lucky in her widowhood. She was a young widow, and a well-to-do widow. Old man Spaulding had been a good provider and a good husband; but he was much older than his wife, and had not particularly engaged her affections. Now that he was dead, after some eighteen months of married life, and had left her one of the two best farms in the county, everybody supposed that Mis’ Spaulding would marry Reuben Pett, who owned the other best farm, besides a saw-mill and a stage-route. That is, everybody thought so, except Samantha and Pett. They calmly kept on in their individual ways, and showed no inclination to join their two properties, though these throve and waxed more and more valuable year by year. They were good friends, however. Reuben Pett was a sagacious counselor, and a prudent man of affairs; and when Samantha’s boy became old enough to work, he was apprenticed to Mr. Pett, to the end that he might some day take charge of the saw-mill business, which his mother stood ready to buy for him.

But the youthful Baxter Spaulding had not reached the age of twenty when he cast down his mother’s hopes in utter ruin by coming home from a business trip to Augusta and announcing that he was going to marry, and that the bride of his choice was a young lady of the variety stage who danced for a living, her specialty being known as “hitch-and-kick.”

Now, this may not seem, to you who read this, quite a complete, perfect and unimprovable thing in the way of the abomination of desolation; but then you must remember that you were not born and raised in a far corner of the Maine hills, and that you probably have so frequently seen play-actoress-women of all sorts that the mere idea of them has ceased to give you cold creeps down your back. And to Samantha Spaulding the whole theatrical system, from the Tragic Muse to the “hitch-and-kick artiste,” was conceived in sin and born in iniquity; and what her son proposed to do was to her no whit better than forgery, arson, or any other ungodliness. To you of a less distinctively Aroostook code of morals, I may say that the enchainer of young Spaulding’s heart was quite as good a little girl in her morals and her manners as you need want to find on the stage or off it; and “hitch-and-kick” dancing was to her only a matter of business, as serio-comic singing had been to her mother, as playing Harlequin had been to her father, and as grinning through a horse-collar had been to her grandfather and great-grandfather, famous old English clowns in their day, one of whom had been a partner of Grimaldi. She made her living, it is true, by traveling around the country singing a song called “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay,” which required a great deal of high-kicking for its just and full artistic expression; but then, it should be remembered, it was the way she had always made her living, and her mother’s living, too, since the old lady lost her serio-comic voice. And as her mother had taught her all she knew about dancing, and as she and her mother had hardly been separated for an hour since she was out of her cradle, Little Betty Billington looked on her profession, as you well may imagine, with eyes quite different from those with which Mrs. Samantha Spaulding regarded it. It was a lop-sided contest that ensued, and that lasted for months. On one side were Baxter and his Betty and Betty’s mama—after that good lady got over her natural objections to having her daughter marry “out of the profession.” On the other side was Samantha, determined enough to be a match for all three of them. Mr. Reuben Pett hovered on the outskirts, asking only peace.

At last he was dragged into the fight. Baxter Spaulding went to Bangor, where his lady’s company happened to be playing, with the avowed intention of wedding Betty out of hand. When his mother found it out, she took Reuben Pett and her boy’s apprenticeship-indenture to Bangor with her, caught the youngster ere the deed was done, and, having the majesty of the law behind her, she was taking her helpless captive home on this particular August afternoon. He was on the front seat of the wagon, Samantha was on the splint-bottomed chair, and Reuben Pett was driving.

* * *

It was a two-days’ drive from the railroad station at Byram’s Pond around the spur of the mountain to their home. The bi-weekly stage did it in a day; but it was unwonted traveling for Mr. Pett’s easy-going team. Therefore, the three travelers put up at Canada Jake’s camp; so called, though it was only on the edge of the wilderness, because it was what Maine people generally mean when they talk of a “camp”—a large shanty of rough, unpainted planks, with a kitchen and eating-room below, and rudely partitioned sleeping-rooms in the upper story. It stood by the roadside, and served the purpose of an inn.

Canada Jake was lounging in the doorway as they came up, squat, bullet-headed and bead-eyed; a very ordinary specimen of mean French Canadian. He welcomed them in as if he were conferring a favor upon them, fed them upon black, fried meat and soggy, boiled potatos, and later on bestowed them in three wretched enclosures overhead.

He himself staid awake until the sound of two bass and one treble snore penetrated the thin partition planks; and then he stole softly up the ladder that served for stairway, and slipped into the moonlit little room where Baxter Spaulding was lying on a cot-bed six inches too short for him. Putting his finger upon his lips, he whispered to the wakeful youth:

“Sh-h-h-h-h-h! You got you’ boots on?”

“No,” said Baxter softly.

“Come wiz me and don’ make no noise!”

And the next thing that Baxter Spaulding knew, he was outside of the house, behind the wood-pile, holding a slight but charming figure in his arms, and saying:

“Why, Betty! why, Betty!” in a dazed sort of way, while a fat and motherly lady near by stood shaking with silent sobs, like a jelly-fish convulsed with sympathy and affection.

“We ’eaded you off in the stage-coach!” was all she said.

* * *

The next morning Mr. Reuben Pett was called out of the land of dreams by a familiar feminine voice from the next room.

“Reuben Pett!” it said; “where is Baxter?”

“Baxter!” yelled Mr. Pett; “your ma wants yer!”

“I heard them last night,” returned Samantha, in tones of conviction. “I know, now. I did. I thought then I was dreamin’.”

“Most likely you was, too!” said Mr. Pett, encouragingly.

“Well, I wa’n’t!” rejoined Mrs. Spaulding, with a suddenness and an acerbity that made her listener jump. “They’ve stole my clothes!”

“Whatever do you mean, Samantha?” roared Reuben Pett.

“I mean,” said Mrs. Spaulding, in a tone that left no doubt whatever that what she did mean she meant very hard; “I mean that that hussy has been here in the night, and has took every stitch and string of my clothing, and ain’t left me so much as a button-hole, except—except—except—”

“Except what?” demanded Reuben, in stark amazement.

“Except that there idolatrous flounced frock the shameless critter doos her stage-dancing in!”

Mr. Pett might, perhaps, have offered appropriate condolences on this bereavement had not a thought struck him which made him scramble down the ladder again and hasten to the woodshed, where he had put up his team the night before. The team was gone—the fat horses and fresh painted wagon, and the tracks led back down the road up which they had ridden the day before.

Once more Mr. Pett climbed the ladder; but when he announced his loss he was met, to his astonishment, with severity instead of with sympathy.

“I don’t care, Reuben Pett,” Samantha spoke through the door; “if you’ve lost ten horses and nineteen wagons. You got to hitch some kind of a critter to suthin’, for we’re goin’ to ketch them people to-day or my name’s not Samantha Spaulding.”

“But Law Sakes Alive, Samantha!” expostulated Mr. Pett; “you ain’t goin’ to wear no circus clothes, be ye?”

“You go hunt a team, Mr. Pett,” returned his companion, tartly; “I know my own business.”

Mr. Pett remonstrated. He pointed out that there was neither horse nor vehicle to be had in the neighborhood, and that pursuit was practically hopeless in view of the start which the runaways had. But Mrs. Spaulding was obdurate with an obduracy that made the heart of Reuben Pett creep into his boots. After ten minutes of vain combating, he saw, beyond a doubt, that the chase would have to continue even if it were to be carried on astraddle a pair of confiscated cows. Having learned that much, he went drearily down again to discuss the situation with Canada Pete. Canada Pete was indisposed to be of the slightest assistance, until Mr. Pett reminded him of the danger of the law in which he stands who aids a runaway apprentice in his flight. After that, the sulky Canadian awoke to a new and anxious interest; and, before long, he remembered that a lumberer who lived “a piece” up the road had a bit of meadow-land reclaimed from the forest, and sometimes kept an old horse in it. It was a horse, however, that had always positively refused to go under saddle, so that a new complication barred the way, until suddenly the swarthy face of the habitant lit up with a joyful, white-toothed grin.

“My old calÈche zat I bring from Canada! I let you have her, hey? You come wiz me!”

And Canada Pete led the way through the underbrush to a bit of a clearing near his house, where were accumulated many years’ deposits of household rubbish; and here, in a desert of tin-cans and broken bottles and crockery, stood the oldest of all old calashes.

There are calashes and calashes, but the calash or calÈche of Canada is practically of one type. It is a high-hung, tilting chaise, with a commodious back seat and a capacious hood, and with an absurd, narrow, cushioned bar in front for the driver to sit on. It is a startling-looking vehicle in its mildest form, and when you gaze upon a calash for the first time you will probably wonder whether, if a stray boy should catch on behind, the shafts would not fly up into the air, bearing the horse between them. Canada Pete’s calash had evidently stood long a monument of decay, yet being of sturdy and simple construction, it showed distinct signs of life when Pete seized its curved shafts and ran it backward and forward to prove that the wheels could still revolve and the great hood still nod and sway like a real calash in commission. It was ragged, it was rusty, it was water-soaked and weather-beaten, blistered and stained; but it hung together, and bobbed along behind Canada Pete, lurching and rickety, but still a vehicle, and entitled to rank as such.

Also, he had been feeding on grass for a whole Summer, and his spirits were those of the young lambkin that gambols in the mead. He was happy, and he wanted to make others happy, although he did not seem always to know the right way to go about it. When Mr. Pett and Canada Pete had got this animal harnessed up with odds and ends of rope and leather, they sat down and wiped their brows. Then Mr. Pett started off to notify Mrs. Samantha Spaulding.

Mr. Pett was a man unused to feminine society, except such as he had grown up with from early childhood, and he was of a naturally modest, even bashful disposition. It is not surprising, therefore, that he was startled when, on re-entering the living-room of Canada Pete’s camp, he found himself face to face with a strange lady, and a lady, at that, of a strangeness that he had never conceived of before. She wore upon her head a preposterously tall bonnet, or at least a towering structure that seemed to be intended to serve the purpose of a bonnet. It reminded him—except for its shininess and newness—of the hood of the calash; indeed, it may have suggested itself vaguely to his memory that his grandmother had worn a piece of head-gear something similar, though not so shapely, which in very truth was nicknamed a “calash” from this obvious resemblance. The lady’s shapely and generously feminine figure was closely drawn into a waist of shining black satin, cut down in a V on the neck, before and behind, and ornamented with very large sleeves of a strange pattern. But her skirts—for they were voluminous beyond numeration—were the wonder of her attire. Within fold after fold they swathed a foamy mystery of innumerable gauzy white underpinnings. As Mr. Pett’s abashed eye traveled down this marvel of costume it landed upon a pair of black stockings, the feet of which appeared to be balanced somewhat uncertainly in black satin slippers with queer high heels.

“Reuben Pett,” said the lady suddenly and with decision, “don’t you say nothing! If you knew how them shoes was pinching me, you’d know what I was goin’ through.”

Mr. Pett had to lean up against the door-post before recovering himself.

“Why, Samantha!” he said at last; “seems to me like you had gone through more or less.”

Here Mrs. Spaulding reached out in an irritation that carried her beyond all speech, and boxed Mr. Pett’s ears. Then she drew back, startled at her own act, but even more surprised at Mr. Pett’s reception of it. He was neither surprised nor disconcerted. He leaned back against the door-post and gazed on unperturbed.

“My!” he said; “Samantha, be them that play-actresses’ clo’es?”

Mrs. Spaulding nodded grimly.

“Well, all I’ve got to say, Samantha,” remarked Reuben Pett, as he straightened himself up and started out to bring their chariot to the door; “all I’ve got to say, and all I want to say, is that she must be a mighty fine figure of a woman, and that you’re busting her seams.”

Down the old dusty road the old calash jiggled and juggled, “weaving” most of the way in easy tacks down the sharp declivities. On the front seat—or, rather, on the upholstered bar—sat Reuben Pett, squirming uncomfortably, and every now and then trying to sit side-saddle fashion for the sake of easier converse with his fair passenger. Mrs. Spaulding occupied the back seat, lifted high above her driver by the tilt

of the curious vehicle, which also served to make the white foundation of her costume particularly visible, so that there were certain jolting moments when she suggested a black-robed Venus rising from a snowy foam-crest. At such moments Mr. Pett lost control of his horse to such an extent that the animal actually danced and fairly turned his long neck around as though it were set on a pivot. When such a crisis was reached, Mrs. Spaulding would utter a shrill and startling “hi!” which would cause the horse to stop suddenly, hurling Mr. Pett forward with such force that he would have to grab his narrow perch to save his neck, and for the next hundred yards or so of descent his attention would be wholly concentrated upon his duties as driver—for the horse insisted upon waltzing at the slightest shock to his nerves.

Mr. Pett’s tendency to turn around and stare should not be laid up against him. For twenty years he had seen his neighbor, Mrs. Samantha Spaulding, once, at least; perhaps twice or thrice; mayhap even six or seven times a week; and yet, on this occasion, he had fair excuse for looking over his shoulder now and then to assure himself that the fair passenger at whose feet he—literally—sat, was indeed that very Samantha of his twenty years’ knowledge. How was he, who was only a man, and no ladies’ man at that, to understand that the local dressmaker and the local habit of wearing wrinkly black alpaca and bombazine were to blame for his never having known that his next door neighbor had a superb bust and a gracious waist? How was he to know that the blindness of his own eyes was alone accountable for his ignorance of the whiteness of her teeth, and the shapeliness of the arms that peeped from the big, old-fashioned sleeves? Samantha’s especial care upon her farm was her well-appointed dairy, and it is well known that to some women work in the spring-house imparts a delicate creaminess of complexion; but he was no close observer, and how was he to know that that was the reason why the little V in the front of Samantha’s black satin bodice melted so softly into the fresh bright tint of her neck and chin? How, indeed, was a man who had no better opportunities than Reuben Pett had enjoyed, to understand that the pretty skirt-dancer dress, a dainty, fanciful travesty of an old-time fashion, had only revealed and not created an attractive and charming woman in his life-long friend and neighbor?

But when Reuben Pett had looked around three or four times, she grasped her skirts in both hands and pushed them angrily down to their utmost length. Then, with a true woman’s dislike of outraging pretty dress material, she made a furtive experiment or two to see if her skirts would not answer all the purposes of modesty without hanging wrong. Perhaps she had a natural talent that way; at any rate, she found that they would.

“Samantha,” said Reuben Pett, over his shoulder, “what under the sun sense be there in chasin’ them two young fools up? If they want to marry, why not let ’em marry? It’s natural for ’em to want to, and it’s agin nature to stop ’em. May be it wouldn’t be sech a bad marriage, after all. Now you look at it in the light of conscience—”

“You’re a nice hand to be advocating marriage, Reuben Pett,” said Mrs. Spaulding; “you jest hurry up that horse and I’ll look out for the light of conscience.”

Mr. Pett chirruped to the capering ewe-neck, and they jolted downward in silence for a half a mile. Then he said suddenly, as if emerging from a cloud of reflection:

“I ain’t never said nothing agin marriage!”

* * *

Noon-time came, and the hot August sun poured down upon them, until the old calash felt, as Mr. Pett remarked, like a chariot of fire. This observation was evolved in a humorous way to slacken the tension of a situation which was becoming distinctly unpleasant. Moved by a spirit of genial and broadly human benevolence which was somewhat unnatural to him, Mr. Pett had insisted upon pleading the cause of the youthful runaways with an insistence that was at once indiscreet and futile. In the end his companion had ordered him to hold his tongue, an injunction he was quite incapable of obeying. After a series of failures in the way of conversational starters, he finally scored a success by suggesting that they should pause and partake of the meagre refection which Canada Pete had furnished them—a modest repast of doughnuts, apples and store-pie. This they ate at the first creek where they found a convenient place to water the horse.

When they resumed their journey, they found that they were all refreshed and in brighter mood. Even the horse was intoxicated by the water and that form of verdure which may pass for grass on the margin of a mountain highway in Maine.

This change of feeling was also perceptible in the manner and bearing of the human beings who made up the cavalcade. Samantha adjusted her furbelows with unconscious deftness and daintiness, while she gazed before her into the bright blue heaven; and, I am sorry to say, sucked her teeth. Reuben frankly flung one leg over the end of his seat, and conversed easily as he drove along, poised like a boy who rides a bare-back horse to water. After awhile he even felt emboldened to resume the forbidden theme of conversation.

“Nature is nature, Samantha,” he said.

“’Tis in some folks,” responded Samantha, dryly; “there’s others seems to be able to git along without it.” And Reuben turned this speech over in his mind for a good ten minutes.

Then, just as he was evidently about to say something, he glanced up and saw a sight which changed the current of his reflections. It was only a cloud in the heavens, but it evidently awakened a new idea in his mind.

“Samantha,” he said, in a tone of voice that seemed inappropriately cheerful; “they’s goin’ to be a thunder storm.”

A thunder storm on the edge of a Maine forest is not wholly a joke. It sometimes has a way of playing with the forest trees much as a table d’hÔte diner plays with the wooden tooth-picks. Samantha’s protests, when Mr. Pett stated that he was going to get under the cover of an abandoned saw-mill which stood by the roadside a little way ahead of them, were more a matter of form than anything else. But still, when they reached the rough shed of unpainted and weather-beaten boards, and Mr. Pett, in turning in gave the vehicle a sudden twist that broke the shaft, her anger at the delay thus rendered necessary was beyond her control.

“I declare to goodness, Reuben Pett,” she cried; “if you ain’t the awkwardest! Anybody’d a’most think you’d done that a purpose.”

“Oh, no, Samantha!” said Reuben Pett, pleasantly; “it ain’t right to talk like that. This here machine’s dreadful old. Why, Samantha, we’d ought to sympathize with it—you and me!”

“Speak for yourself, Mr. Pett,” said Samantha. “I ain’t so dreadful old, whatever you may be.”

At the moment Mr. Pett made no rejoinder to this. He unshipped the merry horse, and tied him to a post under the old saw-mill, and then he pulled the calash up the runway into the first story, and patiently set about the difficult task of mending the broken shaft, while Samantha, looking out through the broad, open doorway, watched the fierce Summer storm descend upon the land; and she tapped her impatient foot until it almost burst its too narrow satin covering.

“No, Samantha,” Mr. Pett said, at last, intently at work upon his splicing; “you ain’t so dreadful old, for a fact; but I’ve knowed you when you was a dreadful sight younger. I’ve knowed you,” he continued, reflectively, “when you was the spryest girl in ten miles round—when you could dance as lively as that young lady whose clo’es you’re a-wearin’.”

“Don’t you dare to talk to me about that jade!” said Mrs. Spaulding, snappishly.

“Why, no! certainly not!” said Mr. Pett; “I didn’t mean no comparison. Only, as I was a-sayin’, there was a time, Samantha, when you could dance.”

“‘Dance now?’” he repeated. “Sho! Samantha, you couldn’t dance nowadays if you was to try.”

“Who says I couldn’t?” asked Samantha, again, with a set look developing around the corners of her mouth.

“I say you couldn’t,” replied Mr. Pett, obtusely. “’Tain’t in nature. But there was a time, Samantha, when you was great on fancy steps.”

“Think I’m too old for fancy steps now, do you?” She looked at her tormentor savagely, out of the corners of her eyes.

“Well, not too old, may be, Samantha,” went on Mr. Pett; “but may be you ain’t that limber you was. I know how it is. I ain’t smart as I used to be, myself. Why, do you remember that night down at the Corners, when we two was the only ones that could jump over Squire Tate’s high andirons and cut a pigeon-wing before we come down?”

Mr. Pett appeared to be entirely unconscious that Mrs. Spaulding’s bosom was heaving, that her eyes were snapping angrily, and that her foot was beating on the floor in that tattoo with which a woman announces that she is near an end of her patience.

“How high was them andirons?” she asked, breathlessly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Reuben, indifferently. He kept his eyes fixed on his work; but while he worked his splice closer with his right hand, with his left he took off his hat and held it out rather more than two feet above the floor.

“’Bout as high as that, may be,” he said. “Remember the tune we done that to? Went some sort of way like this, didn’t it?” And with that remarkable force of talent which is only developed in country solitudes, Mr. Pett began to whistle an old-time air, a jiggetty, wiggetty whirl-around strain born of some dead darkey’s sea-sawing fiddle-bow, with a volume of sustained sound that would have put to shame anything the saw-mill could have done for itself in its buzzingest days.

“Whee-ee-ee, ee-ee, ee ee ee, whee, ee, ee, ee ee!” whistled Mr. Pett; and then, softly, and as if only the dim stirring of memory moved him, he began to call the old figures of the old dance.

“Forward all!” he crooned. “Turn partners! Sashay! Alleman’ all! Whee-ee-ee, ee-ee, ee ee, ee ee ee, whee, ee, ee, ee, ee, ee ee!”

And suddenly, like the tiger leaping from her lair, the soft pattering and shuffling of feet behind him resolved itself into a quick, furious rhythmic beat, and Samantha Spaulding shot high into the air, holding up her skirts with both hands, while her neat ankles crossed each other in a marvelous complication of agility a good twelve inches above his outstretched hat.

“There!” she cried, as she landed with a flourish that combined skill and grace; “there’s what I done with you, and much I think of it! If you want to see dancin’ that is dancin’ look here. Here’s what I did with Ben Griggs at the shuckin’ that same year; and you wa’n’t there, and good reason why!”

And then and there, while Reuben Pett’s great rasping whistle rang through the old saw-mill, shrilling above the roar of the storm outside, Mrs. Samantha Spaulding executed with lightning rapidity and with the precision of perfect and confident knowledge, a dancing-step which for scientific complexity and daring originality had been twenty years before the surprise, the delight, the tingling, shocking, tempting nine-days’-wonder of the country-side.

There is nothing that hath a more heavy and leaden cold than a chilled enthusiasm. When the storm was over, although a laughing light

played over the landscape; although diamond sparkles lit up the grateful white mist that rose from the refreshed earth; although the sun shone as though he had been expecting that thunder storm all day, and was inexpressibly glad that it was over and done with, Samantha leaned back in her seat in the calash, and nursed a cheerless bitterness of spirit—such a bitterness as is known only to the New England woman to whom has come a realization of the fact that she has made a fool of herself. Samantha Spaulding. Made a fool of herself. At her age. After twenty years of respectable widowhood. Her, of all folks. And with that old fool. Who’d be’n a-settin’ and a-settin’ and a-settin’ all these years. And never said Boo! And now for him to twist her round his finger like that. She felt like—well, she didn’t know how she did feel.

She was so long wrapped up in her own thoughts that it was with a start that she awoke to the fact that they were making very slow progress, and that this was due to the very peculiar conduct of Mr. Pett. He was making little or no effort to urge the horse along, and the horse, consequently, having got tired of wasting his bright spirits on the empty air, was maundering. So was Mr. Pett, in another way. He mumbled to himself; from time to time he whistled scraps of old-fashioned tunes, and occasionally he sang to himself a brief catch—the catch coming in about the third or fourth bar.

“Look here, Reuben Pett!” demanded Samantha, shrilly; “be you going to get to Byram’s Pond to-night?”

“I kin,” replied Reuben.

“Well, be you?” Samantha Spaulding inquired.

“I d’no. Fact is, I wa’n’t figurin’ on that just now.”

“Well, what was you figurin’ on?” snapped Mrs. Spaulding.

“When you’s goin’ to marry me,” Mr. Pett answered with perfect composure. “Look here, Samantha! it’s this way: here’s twenty years you’ve kept me waitin’.”

“Me kept you waitin’! Well, Reuben Pett, if I ever!”

“Don’t arguefy, Samantha; don’t arguefy,” remonstrated Mr. Pett; “I ain’t rakin up no details. What we’ve got to deal with is this question as it stands to-day. Be you a-goin’ to marry me or be you not? And if you be, when be you?”

“Reuben Pett,” exclaimed Samantha, with a showing of severity which was very creditable under the circumstances; “ain’t you ashamed of talk like that between folks of our age?”

“We ain’t no age—no age in particular, Samantha,” said Mr. Pett. “A woman who can cut a pigeon-wing over a hat held up higher than any two pair of andirons that I ever see is young enough for me, anyway.” And he chuckled over his successful duplicity.

Samantha blushed a red that was none the less becoming for a tinge of russet. Then she took a leaf out of Mr. Pett’s book.

“Young enough for you?” she repeated. “Well, I guess so! I wa’n’t thinkin’ of myself when I said old, Mr. Pett. I was thinkin’ of folks who was gettin’ most too old to drive down hill in a hurry.”

“Who’s that?” asked Reuben.

“I ain’t namin’ any names,” said Samantha; “but I’ve knowed the time when you wasn’t so awful afraid of gettin’ a spill off the front seat of a calash. Lord! how time does take the tuck out of some folks!” she concluded, addressing vacancy.

“Do you mean to say that I da’sn’t drive you down to Byram’s Pond to-night?” Mr. Pett inquired defiantly.

“I don’t know anything about it,” said Mrs. Spaulding.

Mr. Pett stuck a crooked forefinger into his lady-love’s face, and gazed at her with such an intensity that she was obliged at last to return his penetrating gaze.

“If I get you to Byram’s Pond before the train goes, will you marry me the first meetin’ house we come to?”

In the warm dusk of a Summer’s evening, a limping, shackle-gaited, bewildered horse, dragging a calash in the last stages of ruin, brought two travelers into the village of Byram’s Pond. Far up on the hills there lingered yet the clouds of dust that marked where that calash had come down those hills at a pace whereat no calash ever came down hill before. Dust covered the two travelers so thickly, that, although the woman’s costume was of peculiar and striking construction, its eccentricities were lost in a dull and uniform grayness. Her bonnet, however, would have excited comment. It had apparently been of remarkable height; but pounding against the hood of the calash had so knocked it out of all semblance to its original shape, that with its great wire hoops sticking out “four ways for Sunday,” it looked more like a discarded crinoline perched upon her head than any known form of feminine bonnet.

As the travelers stared with all their eyes, they saw the flap of the tent thrown back, and four figures came out. There were two ladies, a stout, middle-aged lady, a shapely, buxom young lady, a tall, broad-shouldered young man, and the fourth figure was unmistakably a Minister of one of the Congregational denominations. The young man and the two ladies walked down the road a little way, and, entering a solid-looking farm wagon, drove off behind a pair of plump horses, in the direction of the railroad station, while the minister waved them a farewell that was also a benediction.

“Git down, Samantha!” said Reuben Pett, “and straighten out that bonnet of yours. Parson’s got another job before prayer-meetin’ begins.”