long she has lived here in this community,
a world of small things, one is tempted to say, with a sort of expected
and predictable life. I thought last night, as I observed her gently
stirring her rocking-chair, how her life must be made up of small,
often-repeated events: pancakes, puddings, patchings, who knows what
other orderly, habitual, minute affairs? Who knows? Who knows when he
looks at you or at me that there is anything in us beyond the
humdrummery of this day?

In front of her house are two long, boarded beds of old-fashioned
flowers, mignonette and petunias chiefly, and over the small, very white
door with its shiny knob, creeps a white clematis vine. Just inside the
hall-door you will discover a bright, clean, oval rag rug, which
prepares you, as small things lead to greater, for the larger, brighter,
cleaner rug of the sitting-room. There on the centre-table you will
discover "Snow Bound," by John Greenleaf Whittier; Tupper's Poems; a
large embossed Bible; the family plush album; and a book, with a gilt
ladder on the cover which leads upward to gilt stars, called the "Path
of Life." On the wall are two companion pictures of a rosy fat child, in
faded gilt frames, one called "Wide Awake" the other "Fast Asleep." Not
far away, in a corner, on the top of the walnut whatnot, is a curious
vase filled with pampas plumes; there are sea-shells and a piece of
coral on the shelf below. And right in the midst of the room are three
very large black rocking-chairs with cushions in every conceivable and
available place--including cushions on the arms. Two of them are for
you and me, if we should come in to call; the other is for the cat.

When you sit down you can look out between the starchiest of starchy
curtains into the yard, where there is an innumerable busy flock of
chickens. She keeps chickens, and all the important ones are named. She
has one called Martin Luther, another is Josiah Gilbert Holland. Once
she came over to our house with a basket, from one end of which were
thrust the sturdy red legs of a pullet. She informed us that she had
brought us one of Evangeline's daughters.

But I am getting out of the house before I am fairly well into it. The
sitting-room expresses Miss Aiken; but not so well, somehow, as the
immaculate bedroom beyond, into which, upon one occasion, I was
permitted to steal a modest glimpse. It was of an incomparable neatness
and order, all hung about--or so it seemed to me--with whi