he first to leave, whirling
madly and precariously down the street on his wheel, which was
dizzily tall in those days. Mrs. Zelotes, hailing him from her open
window, might as well have hailed the wind. Her family dissensions
were well aired in _The Star_ next morning, and she always kept the
cutting at the bottom of a little rosewood work-box where she stored
away divers small treasures, and never looked at the box without a
swift dart of pain as from a hidden sting and the consciousness as
of the presence of some noxious insect caged therein.

Mrs. Zelotes was more successful in arresting the progress of the
other editors, and (standing at the window, her Bible on the little
table at her side) flatly contradicted all that had been told them
by her daughter-in-law and her sister. "The Louds always give way,
no matter what comes up. You can always tell what kind of a family
anybody comes from by the way they take things when anything comes
across them. You can't depend on anything she says this morning. My
son did not marry just as I wished; everybody knows that; the Louds
weren't equal to our family, and everybody knows it, and I have
never made any secret as to how I felt, but we have always got along
well enough. The Brewsters are not quarrelsome; they never have
been. There were no words whatever last night to make my
granddaughter run away. Eva and Fanny are all wrong about it. Ellen
has been stolen; I know it as well as if I had seen it. A
strange-looking woman came to the door yesterday afternoon; she was
the tallest woman I ever saw, and she took the widest steps; she
measured her dress skirt every step she took, and she spoke gruff. I
said then I knew she was a man dressed up. Ellen was playing out in
the yard, and she saw the child as she went out, and I see her stoop
and look at her real sharp, and my blood run kind of cold then, and
I called Ellen away as quick as I could; and the woman, she turned
round and gave me a look that I won't ever forget as long as I live.
My belief is that that woman was laying in wait when Ellen was going
across the yard home from here last night, and she has got her safe
somewhere till a reward is offered. Or maybe she wants to keep her,
Ellen is such a beautiful child. You needn't put in your papers that
my grandchild run away because of quarrelling in our family, because
she didn't. Eva and Fanny don't know what they are talking about,
they are so wrought up; and, coming from