ave a lingering tenderness
for her yet. I wish she was nearer town. Just that year Peggy had
been very ill indeed, and Kate, her sister, had gone up to nurse
her. When I came home Peggy was getting better, and sent for me to
come up and make a visitation there in June. I hadn't seen Kate for
seven years,--not since she was thirteen; our education
intervened. She had gone through that grading process and come out. By
Jupiter! when she met me at the door of Smith's pretty,
English-looking cottage, I took my hat off, she was so like that
little Brazilian princess we used to see in the _cortege_ of the
court at Paris. What was her name? Never mind that! Kate had just
such large, expressive eyes, just such masses of shiny black hair,
just such a little nose,--turned up undeniably, but all the more
piquant. And her teeth! good gracious! she smiled like a flash of
lightning,--dark and sallow as she was. But she was cross, or stiff,
or something, to me for a long time. Peggy only appeared after dinner,
looking pale and lovely enough in her loose wrapper to make Peter act
excessively like----a young married man, and to make me wish myself at
an invisible distance, doing something beside picking up Kate's
things, that she always dropped on the floor whenever she sewed.
Peggy saw I was bored, so she requested me one day to walk down to the
poultry-yard and ask about her chickens; she pretended a great deal of
anxiety, and Peter had sprained his ankle.

"Kate will go with you," said she.

"No, she won't!" ejaculated that young woman.

"Thank you," said I, making a minuet bow, and off I went to the
farm-house. Such a pretty walk it was, too! through a thicket of
birches, down a little hill-side into a hollow full of hoary
chestnut-trees, across a bubbling, dancing brook, and you came out
upon the tiniest orchard in the world, a one-storied house with a red
porch, and a great sweet-brier bush thereby; while up the hill-side
behind stretched a high picket fence, enclosing huge trees, part of
the same brook I had crossed here dammed into a pond, and a
chicken-house of pretentious height and aspect,--one of those model
institutions that are the ruin of gentlemen-farmers and the delight of
women. I had to go into the farm-kitchen for the poultry-yard key.
The door stood open, and I stepped in cautiously, lest I should come
unaware upon some domestic scene not intended to be visible to the
naked eye. And a scene I did come upon, fit f