; then she hastily tucked away her treasure, and
stepped discreetly down into the soft harrowed and hoed land, and
began to drop corn again, five kernels to a hill. She had seen the top
of Peggy Bond's head over the knoll, and now Peggy herself came
entirely into view, gazing upward to the skies, and stumbling more or
less, but counting the corn by touch and twisting her head about
anxiously to gain advantage over her uncertain vision. Betsey made a
friendly, inarticulate little sound as they passed; she was thinking
that somebody said once that Peggy's eyesight might be remedied if she
could go to Boston to the hospital; but that was so remote and
impossible an undertaking that no one had ever taken the first step.
Betsey Lane's brown old face suddenly worked with excitement, but in a
moment more she regained her usual firm expression, and spoke
carelessly to Peggy as she turned and came alongside.

The high spring wind of the morning had quite fallen; it was a lovely
May afternoon. The woods about the field to the northward were full of
birds, and the young leaves scarcely hid the solemn shapes of a
company of crows that patiently attended the corn-planting. Two of the
men had finished their hoeing, and were busy with the construction of
a scarecrow; they knelt in the furrows, chuckling, and looking over
some forlorn, discarded garments. It was a time-honored custom to make
the scarecrow resemble one of the poor-house family; and this year
they intended to have Mrs. Lavina Dow protect the field in effigy;
last year it was the counterfeit of Betsey Lane who stood on guard,
with an easily recognized quilted hood and the remains of a valued
shawl that one of the calves had found airing on a fence and chewed to
pieces. Behind the men was the foundation for this rustic attempt at
statuary,--an upright stake and bar in the form of a cross. This stood
on the highest part of the field; and as the men knelt near it, and
the quaint figures of the corn-planters went and came, the scene gave
a curious suggestion of foreign life. It was not like New England; the
presence of the rude cross appealed strangely to the imagination.

IV.

Life flowed so smoothly, for the most part, at the Byfleet Boor-farm,
that nobody knew what to make, later in the summer, of a strange
disappearance. All the elder inmates were familiar with illness and
death, and the poor pomp of a town-pauper's funeral. The comings and
goings and the various mis