A Book o' Nine Tales.

Interlude Sixth.
A BUSINESS MEETING

[Certain absurd, not to say malicious, reports having been circulated in regard to the meeting held by the Rosedale Sewing-Circle to decide upon the time, place, and other details of their annual spring fair, it is deemed but simple justice to the estimable ladies who compose that body to give an accurate and unvarnished account of the proceedings on that occasion; and the writer feels that not only will such a narration sufficiently silence all slanders, but that it will as well go far toward a triumphant refutation of the often-repeated falsehood that women have no aptitude for business.]

The meeting, being appointed for 2.30 P. M., was called to order by the president, Mrs. Gilflora Smithe, at 3.30 P. M., the hour preceding having been spent in an animated and pleasant discussion of the important question whether the pastor’s wife, who was detained at home by illness, was really so extravagant as to use granulated sugar in her sweet pickles, as was positively asserted by Miss Araminta Sharp. The secretary read the report of the last meeting, as follows: —

“Monday, April 7. – Meeting called to order by the president. The records read and approved. There being no quorum present, it was unanimously voted to hold the next meeting on Thursday, as that day is more convenient for the ladies. On motion of Mrs. Percy Browne, voted to appoint a committee of one to take charge of the Art Department of the fair. Mrs. Browne kindly volunteered to serve as that committee. Adjourned.”

The records having been approved, the president remarked that there was so much business to come before the meeting that she really could not tell where to begin, and she should be glad if some one would make a motion, just to start things.

“A motion to put things in motion,” murmured Miss Keene, looking around with the smile which everybody knew meant that she had made a joke.

Everybody smiled also, although nobody saw the point until the president echoed, with a pleased air of discovery, “Motion, – motion! Very good, Miss Keene.”

Then they all smiled once again, and Miss Gray told of an excellent jest made by a cousin in Boston: —

“My cousin in Boston – that is, she isn’t my real cousin, but a step-cousin by marriage – was at a concert once, and she made an awfully good joke. I don’t remember exactly now what it was, but it was awfully funny. It was something about music, and we all laughed.”

“It doesn’t seem to me,” spoke up Miss Sharp, acidly, “that Boston jokes will help the fair much; and I move you, Mrs. President, – if I don’t make a motion, I’m sure I don’t know who ever will, – that the fair be held on the 20th of April.”

“I second the motion,” promptly spoke up Miss Snob, who always seconded everything.

“It is moved and seconded,” said the president, “that the fair be held on the 20th of April; but I’m sure the 23d would suit me a great deal better.”

“Why not have it the 17th?” asked Miss Keene; “that seems to me quite late enough.”

“Oh, dear, no,” interrupted Mrs. Percy Browne, “I never could get half the things done for my department by that time. I move we have it the 30th.”

“Second the motion,” promptly responded Miss Snob.

“It is moved and seconded,” propounded Mrs. Smithe from the chair, “that the fair be held on the 30th. That seems to me an excellent time. If it be your minds, you will please to signify it. It is a vote.”

“I still stick to the 20th,” declared Miss Sharp, viciously. “I shall open my candy-table then, whether the rest of the fair is ready or not.”

“Sweets to the sweet,” murmured Miss Keene, looking around with her jest-announcing smile.

“The 20th is Sunday, any way,” observed the Hon. Mrs. Sampson Hoyt, in tones of great condescension.

“I don’t care,” persisted the contumacious Sharp. “I’ll have my part of the fair then, any way.”

“Suppose we compromise,” suggested the president, pacifically, “and say the 25th.”

There was considerable discussion, more or less acrimonious, at this proposition, but it was finally adopted without the formality of a vote, the secretary being instructed to set the date April 25th down as the final decision of the meeting.

“There will have to be a general committee of arrangements,” the president observed, this important preliminary having been settled. “I suppose it is customary for the chair to appoint them; but I am ready to receive nominations.”

“I nominate Miss Keene,” said Mrs. Browne, who wished to keep in that lady’s good graces.

“Second the motion,” Miss Snob exclaimed, with enthusiasm.

“Miss Keene will have enough to do at the cake-table,” Mrs. Smithe replied. “I think I’ll appoint Mrs. Hoyt, Mrs. Crowler, Mrs. Henderson, and Mrs. Lowell.”

“There’s never but three on that committee,” snapped Miss Sharp. “You’ll have to take off one.”

“Dear me!” responded Mrs. Smithe, in dismay; “I think you must be mistaken.”

But Miss Sharp persisted, and the president, driven into a corner, was forced to propose that one of the ladies named should resign. Nobody seemed willing to do this, however, and it was at length decided that some one of the four should regard herself as a substitute, to act in case one of the others could not serve. The president could not, however, bring herself to specify which should be the substitute, and was greatly relieved when the conversation was turned by Mrs. Henderson’s remarking, —

“Speaking of substitutes reminds me. Did you know that you could make mince-pies without meat? My niece from Bangor – ”

[The talk of the next fifteen minutes is omitted, as being irrelevant, relating exclusively to cooking. At the expiration of that time, the business of the occasion was accidentally reintroduced by an allusion on the part of Mrs. Crowler to some delicious chocolate macaroons which she had eaten at a fair in East Machias.]

“We really must have some more committees,” the president said, recovering herself with a start. “Will somebody make a motion?”

“I don’t think Friday is a good day for a fair, any way,” Mrs. Lowell now remarked, reflectively. “The 25th is Friday.”

“Oh, I never thought of that,” exclaimed half a dozen ladies, in dismay. “We should be all tired out for baking-day.”

“I don’t know what we can do,” the president said, in despairing accents, – “there seem to be so many days, and only one fair; and we’ve had so many dates proposed. We shall have to unvote something.”

It was at this crisis that the Hon. Mrs. Sampson Hoyt rose to the heights of the parliamentary opportunity.

“I move the previous question,” she said, distinctly and firmly.

There fell a hush of awe over the sewing-circle, and even Miss Snob was a moment in bringing out her second.

“I don’t think!” Mrs. President Smithe ventured, a little falteringly, “that I quite understood the motion.”

“I moved,” the Hon. Mrs. Hoyt replied, with the air of one conscious that her husband had once been almost nominated to the State Legislature, and had been addressed as Honorable ever after, “I moved the previous question.”

“Yes?” Mrs. Smithe said, inquiringly and pleadingly.

“That takes everything back to the beginning,” Mrs. Hoyt condescended to explain, “and we can then change the date of our fair in a strictly legal way.”

She threw a glance of superb scorn around her as she spoke, and even Miss Sharp took on a subdued and corrected air.

“It is moved and seconded the previous question,” Mrs. Smithe propounded, with an air of great relief. “It is a vote.”

“I don’t think we had better do away with everything in this case,” Mrs. Hoyt observed, with a smile of gracious concession. “We might let the committee of arrangements stand.”

“That she’s chairman of,” whispered Mrs. Crowler, spitefully.

“I don’t remember,” observed Miss Sharp, gazing into futurity with an air of abstraction, “that there is anything in the by-laws about the previous question.”

A flutter stirred the entire company. The ladies looked at each other, and then with one accord turned their regards upon the Hon. Mrs. Hoyt, as one who, having got them into this difficulty, was in honor bound to help them out of it.

“I supposed everybody knew,” that lady remarked, with icy sweetness, “that the rules of making motions do not have to be in the by-laws. They are in” – the speaker hesitated, not being exactly sure of the title of the volume to which her husband had given so careful attention when expecting to be nominated: feeling, however, that anything was better than the appearance of ignorance, she went on precipitately – “in ‘Pole’s Manual.’”

Even Miss Sharp had no retort adequate to meet this crushing appeal to authority, not being sufficiently well informed to connect Pole with whist, so she contented herself by observing, with a sniff, that for her part she was glad she did not know so much as some people pretended to.

“It does seem to me,” observed Mrs. Henderson, at this point, “that we might let this one year go by without a fair. There’s been so much sickness in Rosedale this winter that everybody is tired out, and we had a great deal better wait till June, and have a strawberry-festival. I move we put the whole thing off till then.”

“Second the motion,” cried Miss Snob, with great promptitude.

“I cannot consent to put that motion,” the president said, with great dignity. “We have made up our minds to have a fair now, and we might as well have it, and be done with it.”

“I move,” Mrs. Browne put in sweetly, with the intention of suiting everybody, “that we have a fair and a strawberry-festival.”

Miss Snob seconded this motion with her customary enthusiasm.

“It is moved and seconded,” the president said, “that we have a fair and a strawberry-festival. But that seems a great deal; and I think I had better declare it not a vote, unless doubted.”

Nobody was clear about the effects of doubting a negative proposition; but Mrs. Crowler was pleased to observe, “Well, any way, now I come to think it over, I think, on the whole, I won’t be on the arrangements committee at all; but I’ll be chairman of the finance committee when that is fixed, – and that’ll leave only three on the arrangements.”

This moved Mrs. Henderson to resign, and Mrs. Lowell following her example, Mrs. Hoyt was left in solitary grandeur upon the committee.

Matters were not improved, moreover, when Miss Keene remarked, “If we’ve voted ‘the previous question,’ I don’t see but we’ve still got to fix the day. All that is undone now.”

“Certainly,” responded the Hon. Mrs. Sampson Hoyt, with the virtuous joy of an iconoclast gazing on the ruin he has wrought.

“We don’t seem to have anything exactly fixed,” the president said, with a helpless and conciliatory smile. “If somebody would make a motion – ”

“It’s too late to make any more motions to-day,” Miss Sharp interrupted, with much vigor. “It’s ten minutes of six.”

At this announcement of the lateness of the hour, the entire company started to their feet in dismay; and although, when the president and secretary tried next day to remember what had been done, that the latter might make up her report, they recorded that the meeting adjourned, that statement must be regarded as having been purely a parliamentary fiction, entered in the secretary’s book to gratify that instinct innate in woman’s breast to follow exactly the regular and strictest forms of recognized rules of order.

Tale the Seventh.
A SKETCH IN UMBER

Every life has its history: this is the story of Ruth Welch, the placid-faced, silver-haired woman who sat in the September twilight looking out over the moorlands one Saturday evening, and considering many things.

The house faced toward the south. It looked across a little creek which made in from the sea, and it had in its prospect only level heaths to the horizon’s edge. On the west stretched the waters of an arm of the Atlantic, and the tides came twice a day around the low cape into the inlet, and the wind blew over the moors; but in all directions one looked upon level wastes, – “the plains,” the country people called them, speaking of them sometimes as “Welch’s bogs,” or in sections as the “blueb’ry plains,” or the “cramb’ry marshes;” and people who lived outside of them regarded the moors as painfully dull.

They were not, too, without some excuse for such an opinion. The rhodora and the kalmia – the “lamb-kill” – in spring spread over sections of the waste transient sheets of glowing color, but for the most part the country was either white or brown, and to one not fond of it the effect of the monotone of hue was depressing. The shade of brown varied, changing from a grayish or even greenish brown in midsummer to a sombre, almost uniform umber in autumn, which latter tint now and then during the winter appeared in desolate patches through the flats of snow, until in March the whole plain came to light darker and more forbidding than ever.

All these long months the only break in the low monochrome of the landscape was the red cottage which still was called “Gran’sir’ Welch’s,” although the old man had been dead many a year, and the little garden before it that kept up, with old-fashioned flowers, a show of bravery until the frosts came. The tint of the old house was dull and dingy, but in so colorless a setting the hue seemed brighter, as a single event might assume undue importance in a monotonous life. If one could have supposed the builder an imaginative man or one given to refinements of sentiment, it might be easy to imagine that when he built his house thus alone in the plains, with not another dwelling in sight and without a break in the level landscape, he felt the need of giving it some color that should protest against the deadly grayness of all around and hearten its owner by its warmth of tone.

So overwhelming were the solitude and the unbroken sameness of the place, however, that an imaginative man would scarcely have chosen it as an abiding-place, although once involved in its powerful fascination he would have been held to his life’s end. By what accident Gran’sir’ Welch’s grandfather had chosen to build here, half a score of miles from the little fishing village which stood to the people of that region for the world, no one knew, and very likely no one cared. Folk thereabout concerned themselves little with reasons for anything, facts being all they found mental grasp sufficient to hold. Once established in the plains, however, there was no especial cause to suppose the family would not continue to live on there until its course was interrupted either by extinction or by the arrival of the Judgment-Day.

Extinction was not very far off now, since only this white-haired woman remained to bear the name. Her mother had died in the daughter’s infancy. Mrs. Welch had never adapted herself to the silence and loneliness of the moors, and her people over at the village declared that she had “died of the plains;” and it is possible that they were right. Ruth’s father, when she was still but a child, had been lost at sea; and the girl had been cared for by her grandfather and the old serving-woman Bethiah, who had once been supposed to be a hired girl, but had ended by being so thoroughly identified with the family that her surname was wellnigh forgotten, and she was designated, when she was spoken of at all, as Bethiah Welch.

The child grew much in the same way as grew the houseleeks in the boxes beside the southern door, very slowly and dully. Once or twice she went for a few months to stay with an aunt in the village ten miles away, it being the unanimous opinion of her relatives that as the Welches always had known how to read and write it was proper that something should be done for Ruth’s education; and the village school was the only educational means known in the region. The girl pined for home, however, and was never content away from the red house. Perhaps by a strange perversity of circumstance the home-longing of the mother was in the child transformed into a clinging fondness for the place where the former was so lonely and alien. The low, level moors were necessary to Ruth’s life; in their colorless monotony she somehow found the complement for her uneventful life. Perhaps the very dulness developed her imagination, as special organs appear in animals whose abnormal conditions of existence render them needful. If this were so, it was no less true that the moors absorbed whatever mental life they stimulated, until the girl seemed hardly less a part of them than the knolls of leathery shrubs, the scattered, shallow pools, the tufts of coarse grass, or the whispering voices of the wind which all night long and every night were hurrying to and fro, concerned with unspeakable tidings which perhaps came from the sea that forever moaned along the moorland’s edges.

Little conscious imagination had Ruth at nineteen; and it was at nineteen that the single, trifling event of her life occurred. She was a maiden by no means uncomely. She was not educated in any conventional sense of the term; but her life alone with her grandfather and old Bethiah and the great brown moors had bred in her a certain sweet gravity which was not without its charm, had there been but those to see who could appreciate it.

Along the front of the house ran a bench, where people seldom sat, since there were none to sit, but where the milk-pans dried in the sun, a gleaming row; and one sunny morning late in September the flash of their shimmer caught the eye of a skipper who in his yacht in the bay studied the horizon with his glass. He was not yet past those years when a man still finds amusement in imitating fate and nature by yielding to his impulses; the gleam suggested pleasant draughts of fresh milk; and without more ado, he headed the trig little craft in which he and a brother artist were skirting the coast of the Gulf of Maine for the little inlet upon which Gran’sir’ Welch’s red cottage stood.

In those days yachts were less common than now, and both Ruth and Bethiah left their work to watch the boat as it ran up to the low wharf, and the snowy sail fell with a musical rattle and clash of metallic rings.

The skipper, a stalwart young fellow, too handsome by half, came briskly ashore and did his errand, and while the old servant went for the milk, stood with Ruth by the open door asking idle questions, to which she replied without either shyness or boldness. His eyes were just on a level with hers as she stood on the threshold above him, and their bold, merry glance saw with full appreciation how clear were her sherry-brown orbs. He removed his cap and leaned against the door-post, letting his glance stray over the landscape. Here and there upon the brown surface his keen eye detected the flame of a scarlet leaf amid the prevailing russet, but the combined effect of all the red leaves upon the plain could not warm the sombre wastes.

“Don’t you get tired of the sameness?” he asked suddenly, as if the monotony all at once seemed to him too great to be borne.

“Oh, no,” Ruth answered, smiling faintly, “I like it.”

He brushed back his curly, golden locks with a shapely brown hand, and regarded her more closely.

“It is like a fish in the water,” was his conclusion when he spoke again. “It would drown me.”

Ruth smiled again, showing her white, even teeth a little, although she did not in the least understand what he meant; and before the conversation could go further Bethiah appeared with the milk she had been getting. Ruth put aside the stranger’s offer of pay, and with an instinct of hospitality which must have been genuine indeed to have survived so long disuse from lack of opportunity, she stepped down into the little garden-plot and picked a nosegay of the old-fashioned flowers which in the southern exposure were still unharmed by frost.

“Put a posy in my button-hole,” he requested lightly, when she gave them to him. “Pick out the prettiest.”

She had never stuck a flower in a man’s coat, but she was too utterly devoid of self-consciousness to be shy. She selected a beautiful clove pink, and smiling her grave smile, thrust the stem through the buttonhole of his yachting-jacket as he held out the lapel.

“It would be just the color of your cheeks,” he said, “if it could only get sunburned.”

A redder glow flushed up at his words, and so tempting was the innocent face before him that half involuntarily he bent forward to kiss the smooth lips. The girl drew back, in that grave, unemotional fashion of hers which was to the stranger so unaccountable at once and so fascinating, and he failed of his intent.

“Ah, well,” he said, in nowise disconcerted, “keep the kiss for your sweetheart, but thank you for the flowers.”

He laughed with a gleeful, deep-toned note, and turned down the faintly-defined path to the shore again.

Ruth looked on with interest at the hoisting of the sail; she smiled responsively as the two mariners doffed their caps to her, and then, regardless of the old superstition of the ill-luck of watching people out of sight, she kept her eyes fixed upon the pretty little craft as it skimmed over the waters, as long as it could be seen. Then she turned a comprehensive glance over all her moors, as if to to take them into confidence regarding the pleasant incident which had just happened, and returned to her interrupted domestic duties. The interview had touched her with no repinings; and even could she have known that in that brief moment all the romance of her life had been acted, she would scarcely have sighed. She smiled as she went about her homely occupations, and flushed a little with the consciousness of innocent vanity as she found herself glancing into the glass at the reflection of her softly-glowing cheeks, reddened with health and with the sun.

This September day was the single glowing spot in the slow, mellow years of Ruth’s life. She came and went, slept and waked, perhaps even dreamed. She was always in a happy, contented repose among her moors, becoming of them every day more and more completely a part. The wide plains grew green in spring with transient verdure, the purple petals of the rhodora flushed through their brief day and dropped into the shallow brown pools left by the late rains in the hollows; then all the waste turned to fawn and russet under the suns of summer, and the cycle of the year was completed by deepening browns and the wide stretches of snow. Now and again great rolling masses of mist came up from the sea and hid wold and wave alike from sight, but yet the sense of the plains was like a presence to Ruth, as with heart warm as an egg beneath the mother-bird’s breast, she went her way and lived her span of life.

She was far from being dull in her feelings. Indeed, for one in her station and surroundings, she was unusually sensitive to mood of shore and sky, to the beauty of the sunsets or of the wild flowers which sprang amid the low shrubs. She was simply content. She was so perfectly in harmony with her world that she could not be unhappy. She grew as a bluebell grows. She was not deficient in womanly sentiment. She thought sometimes of the handsome sailor lad whose bold brown eyes had looked into hers, and she smiled anew with simple pleasure that he had found her fair. She remembered the audacious gleam which crossed his face when he bent forward to kiss her, and she did not forget his words about a sweetheart. She never spoke of her memories, – she came of a reticent race, and neither Gran’sir’ Welch nor Bethiah was especially adapted to the reception of confidences, – but she speculated concerning the sweetheart she never had, and of whose coming fate gave no sign. There was never any tinge of melancholy in these reflections. She accepted life too simply to be sad, even with that vague oppression which seemed to casual observers the obvious consequence of the overpowering presence of the wastes.

As years went on, she accepted the fact that the time of dreams of love was past, and with placid content she reflected that the shadow of the ungiven kiss of the sailor would never be disturbed by the pressure of lover’s lips upon hers.

It is between twenty and thirty that the temperament of a woman becomes fixed, and all her future irrevocably made or marred. Before this her character is too flexible, after this too rigid for impressions to be lasting. During these years the peace of the wide, calm, and sombre moorlands stamped indelibly upon Ruth a sweet, grave content which nothing could destroy or shake.

There came a time when into the calm of the old house death rushed, with that dreadful precipitancy which always marks his coming, even when expected, and old Gran’sir’ Welch, long past fourscore, was, in the quaint language of the King James version, gathered to his fathers.

In the gray dawn Ruth tapped softly at the hives of the bees which stood, straw-thatched, against the eastern end of the cottage, and announced the sad news, firmly believing that unless within twelve hours the swarms were told of death they would desert their homes. Then in the sunny autumn afternoon a funeral procession of boats trailed from the red cottage to the graveyard behind the church in the village, where slept such of his forefathers as the sea had spared to die in their beds. With evenly dipping oars went first the quaintly-shaped pinky bearing the coffin between two stout fisherman, one at prow and one at stern; while after followed the dories in which were the few nearer relatives who had come to attend the services at the house.

Ruth sat beside a cousin and listened half unconsciously to the plash of the oars and the rhythmic beat of the waves against the boat, looking back with tear-dimmed eyes to the red house until it was by distance blended with the dun country as the last spark dies amid the ashes. She was sad, and she felt that oppressive terror which the presence of death brings; yet her calm was not seriously or permanently shaken.

In their relentless, even course the years moved on, and one day in spring, when the rhodora was in all its glory, and the one bush of mountain-laurel in the wide plains, which had strayed into the heath like a lamb into the wilderness, was as white in the distance as a bunch of upland maybloom, again Ruth went softly and gravely to tell the bees that death had been in the red house, and the procession of boats, like the Egyptian train over the Lake of the Dead, bore away the mortal remains of faithful old Bethiah.

Ruth’s relatives in the village tried to induce her now to come to them, and when she could not be moved to do this, urged her at least to have some one live with her. She was getting to be an old woman, they said among themselves, although in truth she was little past fifty, and since for that part of the world she was not ill-provided with worldly goods, there was no lack of those who were willing to take up their abode as her companion in the red house.

Ruth put all offers aside, – kindly, indeed, but decisively. She was pleased to live alone; not from a misanthropic dislike of her kind, but because it was so deep and inexhaustible a delight to her to brood happily among her plains. More and more she loved these umber wastes, over which cloud-shadows drifted like the darkening ripple of the wind on the sea. She knew all their ways, those mysterious paths which wind between the hillocks of deserted heaths as if worn with the constant passing of invisible feet, and she was never weary of wandering among the ragged hummocks, breathing in the salt air from the sea and noting with happy eyes all the weeds and wild flowers, the shrubs that were too inconspicuous to be singled out at a distance, but which to the careful and loving observer revealed themselves as full of beauty. She was fond of the faint, sweet scents of the opening flowers in spring, of the dying grass in fall, of the burning peat when fires broke out sometimes to smoulder until the next rain. She never thought about her feelings or phrased the matter to herself, but she loved so perfectly these wastes which seemed so desolate that they were to her as kindred and home; perhaps even the maternal instinct which is inborn in every woman’s breast found some not quite inadequate expression in her almost passionate fondness for the great heath.

Her relatives spoke of her always as “odd,” and were aggrieved that her ways should be different from theirs; but everything that continues comes in time to be accepted, and as the years went on Ruth’s method of life came to seem proper because it had so long been the same. A brawny armed fisher cousin sailed over from the village every Sunday morning to see that all was well at the red house, and to bring whatever might be needed from the village store. Sometimes in winter he found her house half buried in snow, but he never could report that she appeared either discontented or sad.

It was of the coming of this emissary that Ruth was thinking on this Saturday night in September where first this record found her. She had been reflecting much to-day about dying. In her walk about the heath she had come upon a dead bird, and the sight had suggested to her her own end. She acknowledged to herself that she was old, and for perhaps the only time in her life her thought had formulated a general truth. She had regarded the tiny corpse at her feet, and then, looking about upon the moors, it came over her how immortal is the youth of the world and how brief is man’s life. The land about her was no older than when she had looked upon it with baby eyes. For a single instant a poignant taste of bitterness seemed set to her lips; then in a moment the very wide, changeless plain that had caused her pain seemed itself somehow to assuage it.

To-night sitting here she admitted to herself that her strength had failed somewhat of late. Yes, she was old. It was almost half a century ago that that bold-eyed handsome stranger had compared the color in her cheeks to a clove pink. She smiled serenely, although her reflections were of age and death, so perfectly did she recall the sunny day and the air with which the sailor would have kissed her. Placid and content in the gathering dusk, she smiled her own grave, sweet smile, which it were scarcely too fanciful to liken to the odor of the clove pink of her garden-plot whose hue half a century ago had been in her cheek. She had but one regret in leaving life, and that was to leave her moorlands. She had found existence so pleasant and had been so well content that she could not understand why people so usually spoke of life as sad; but she could not think without pain of leaving the plains behind and going away to lie in the bleak hillside graveyard where slept her kinsfolk. It had never occurred to her before to consider to which she held more strongly, her people or the wide brown stretches of open about her, but to-night she debated it with herself and decided it. She resolved to say to her cousin tomorrow that she wished her grave made in the plains. Very likely her relatives would object. They had always thought her ideas strange; but they would surely let her have her way in this. She would even make some concessions and perhaps let Cousin Sarah come to live with her if they would agree to do as she wished about this. It would be so great a comfort to her to be assured that she was not in death to be separated from her dearly loved moors. She liked Sarah well enough, only that it was so pleasant to live alone with her bees and the plains. Besides, if she should chance to die alone, who would tell the bees? It would be a pity to have the fine swarms lost.