id he lived. An almost illegible sign at the corner
announced it to be "Hillside Avenue." There were not two fences abutting
upon the lane that were set in line, while the sidewalks were narrow or
broad, according to the taste of the several owners of property along
the way.

The beautiful old trees were everywhere, however; only some of them
needed trimming badly, and many overhung the roofs, their dripping
branches having rotted the shingles and given life to great patches of
green moss. There was a sogginess to the grass-grown yards that seemed
unhealthful. There were several, picturesque, old wells, with massive
sweeps and oaken buckets--quaint breeders of typhoid germs--which showed
that the physicians of Poketown had not properly educated their patients
to modern sanitary ideas.

Altogether the village in which her father had been born and bred was a
dead-and-alive, do-nothing place, and its beauty, for Janice Day, faded
before she was halfway up the hill to her uncle's house.

CHAPTER III

"IT JEST RATTLES"

Almira Day was a good-hearted woman. It was not in her to treat her
husband's niece otherwise than kindly, despite her threat to the
contrary when Jason left the old Day house to meet Janice at the
steamboat dock.

She stood smiling in the doorway--a large, pink, lymphatic woman, as
shapeless as a half-filled meal-sack with a string tied around its
middle, quite as untidy as her husband in dress, but with clean skin and
a wholesome look.

Her calico dress was faded and, in places, strained to the
bursting-point, showing that it was "store-bought" and had never been
fitted to Mrs. Day's bulbous figure. She wore a pair of men's slippers
very much down at the heel, and pink stockings with a gaping hole in the
seam at the back of one, which Janice very plainly saw as her aunt
preceded her upstairs to the room the visitor was to occupy.

"I hope ye won't mind how things look," drawled Aunt 'Mira. "We ain't
as up-an'-comin' as some, I do suppose. But nothin' ain't gone well with
Jason late years, an' he's got some mis'ry that he can't git rid of,
so's he can't work stiddy. Look out for this nex' ter the top step. The
tread's broke an' I been expectin' ter be throwed from top to bottom of
these stairs for weeks."

"Can't Uncle Jason fix it?" asked Janice, stepping over the broken
tread.

"Wal, he ain't exactly got 'round to it yet," confessed her aunt.
"There! I do hope you like your room, Niec