ven't you
seen girls of four-and-twenty who have nibbled and been nibbled at ever
since they were sixteen, but who have neither caught anything nor been
caught? They are old, if you like, but Lyddy was forty and still young,
with her susceptibilities cherished, not dulled, and with all the
"language of passion fresh and rooted as the lovely leafage about a
spring."

IV.

"He shall daily joy dispense
Hid in song's sweet influence."

Emerson's _Merlin._

Lyddy had very few callers during her first month as a property owner
in Edgewood. Her appearance would have been against her winning friends
easily in any case, even if she had not acquired the habits of a
recluse. It took a certain amount of time, too, for the community to get
used to the fact that old Mrs. Butterfield was dead, and her niece
Lyddy Ann living in the cottage on the river road. There were numbers
of people who had not yet heard that old Mrs. Butterfield had bought the
house from the Thatcher boys, and that was fifteen years ago; but this
was not strange, for, notwithstanding aunt Hitty's valuable services in
disseminating general information, there was a man living on the Bonny
Eagle road who was surprised to hear that Daniel Webster was dead, and
complained that folks were not so long-lived as they used to be.

Aunt Hitty thought Lyddy a Goth and a Vandal because she took down
the twenty silver coffin plates and laid them reverently away. "Mis'
Butterfield would turn in her grave," she said, "if she knew it. She
ain't much of a housekeeper, I guess," she went on, as she cut over
Dr. Berry's old trousers into briefer ones for Tommy Berry. "She gives
considerable stuff to her hens that she'd a sight better heat over and
eat herself, in these hard times when the missionary societies can't
hardly keep the heathen fed and clothed and warmed--no, I don't mean
warmed, for most o' the heathens live in hot climates, somehow or
'nother. My back door's jest opposite hers; it's across the river, to
be sure, but it's the narrer part, and I can see everything she does as
plain as daylight. She washed a Monday, and she ain't taken her clothes
in yet, and it's Thursday. She may be bleachin' of 'em out, but it
looks slack. I said to Si last night I should stand it till 'bout
Friday,--seein' 'em lay on the grass there, but if she didn't take 'em
in then, I should go over and offer to help her. She has a fire in the
settin'-room 'most every nigh