make me
feel I'm about the oldest thing alive."

"Oh, come now! you mustn't begin to talk that way, or I'll have to
give you more of the antidote. You are threatened with a relapse."

"No more," ordered Harriet with a forbidding hand, "and I repeat
what I said. Of course you know I never gossip, Anna; but when I
talk to you, I do not feel as though I were talking to anybody."

"Why, of course not," said Miss Anna, trying to make the most of
the compliment, "I am nobody at all, just a mere nonentity,
Harriet."

"Anna," said Harriet, after a pause of unusual length, "if it had
not been for my mother, I should have been married long ago.
Thousands of worse-looking women, and of actually worse women,
marry every year in this world and marry reasonably well. It was
because she tried to marry me off: that was the bottom of the
deviltry--the men saw through her."

"I am afraid they did," admitted Miss Anna, affably, looking down
into a hole.

"Of course I know I am not brilliant," conceded Harriet, "but then
I am never commonplace."

"I should like to catch any one saying such a thing."

"Even if I were, commonplace women always make the best wives: do
they not?"

"Oh, don't ask that question in this porch," exclaimed Miss Anna a
little resentfully. "What do I know about it!"

"My mother thinks I am a weak woman," continued Harriet, musingly.
"If my day ever comes, she will know that I am, strong, Anna,
_strong_."

"Ah, now, you must forgive your mother," cried Miss Anna, having
reached a familiar turn in this familiar dialogue. "Whatever she
did, she did for the best. Certainly it was no fault of yours.
But you could get married to-morrow if you wished and you know it,
Harriet." (Miss Anna offered up the usual little prayer to be
forgiven.)

The balm of those words worked through Harriet's veins like a
poison of joy. So long as a single human being expresses faith in
us, what matters an unbelieving world? Harriet regularly visited
Miss Anna to hear these maddening syllables. She called for them
as for the refilling of a prescription, which she preferred to get
fresh every time rather than take home once for all and use as
directed.

Among a primitive folk who seemed to have more moral troubles than
any other and to feel greater need of dismissing them by artificial
means, there grew up the custom of using a curious expedient. They
chose a beast of the field and upon its head symbolically piled a