good for the hens; they always laid so much
better in the winter time.

Lyddy liked the place all the better for its loneliness. She had never
had enough of solitude, and this quiet home, with the song of the
river for company, if one needed more company than chickens and a cat,
satisfied all her desires, particularly as it was accompanied by a snug
little income of two hundred dollars a year, a meagre sum that seemed to
open up mysterious avenues of joy to her starved, impatient heart.

When she was a mere infant, her brother was holding her on his knee
before the great old-fashioned fireplace heaped with burning logs.
A sudden noise startled him, and the crowing, restless baby gave an
unexpected lurch, and slipped, face downward, into the glowing embers.
It was a full minute before the horror-stricken boy could extricate the
little creature from the cruel flame that had already done its fatal
work. The baby escaped with her life, but was disfigured forever. As
she grew older, the gentle hand of time could not entirely efface the
terrible scars. One cheek was wrinkled and crimson, while one eye and
the mouth were drawn down pathetically. The accident might have changed
the disposition of any child, but Lyddy chanced to be a sensitive,
introspective bit of feminine humanity, in whose memory the burning
flame was never quenched. Her mother, partly to conceal her own wounded
vanity, and partly to shield the timid, morbid child, kept her out of
sight as much as possible; so that at sixteen, when she was left an
orphan, she had lived almost entirely in solitude.

She became, in course of time, a kind of general nursery governess in a
large family of motherless children. The father was almost always away
from home; his sister kept the house, and Lyddy stayed in the nursery,
bathing the brood and putting them to bed, dressing them in the morning,
and playing with them in the safe privacy of the back garden or the open
attic. They loved her, disfigured as she was, for the child despises
mere externals, and explores the heart of things to see whether it be
good or evil,--but they could never induce her to see strangers, nor to
join any gathering of people.

The children were grown and married now, and Lyddy was nearly forty when
she came into possession of house and lands and fortune; forty, with
twenty years of unexpended feeling pent within her. Forty, that is
rather old to be interesting, but age is a relative matter. Ha