with a glass o' this stamp," he said. "How
much does one like that cost?" he inquired.

"I'll sell you this one--" began Ebenezer; "wait a week or two and I may
sell you this one," he said. "I ain't really looked through it myself
yet."

Not much after this, the two went away and left Ebenezer in the dark
yard.

He stood in the middle of his little grass plot and looked through his
glass again. That night there was, so to say, nothing remote about the
sky, save its distance. It had none of the reticence of clouds. It made
you think of a bed of golden bells, each invisible stalk trying on its
own account to help forward some Spring. As he had said, he did not know
one star from another, nor a planet for a planet with a name. It had
been years since he had seen the heavens so near. He moved about,
looking, and passed the wall of leafless lilacs and mulberries. Stars
hung in his boughs like fruit for the plucking. They patterned patches
of sky. He looked away and back, and it was as if the stars repeated
themselves, like the chorus of everything.

"You beggars," Ebenezer said, "awful dressed up, ain't you? It must be
for something up there--it ain't for anything down here, let me tell
you."

He went up to his dark back door. From without there he could hear Kate
Kerr, his general servant, who had sufficient personality to compel the
term "housekeeper," setting sponge for bread, with a slapping, hollow
sound and a force that implied a frown for every down stroke of the iron
spoon. He knew how she would turn toward the door as he entered, with
her way of arching eyebrows, in the manner of one about to recite the
symptoms of a change for the worse--or at best to say "about the same"
to everything in the universe. And when Kate Kerr spoke, she always
whispered on the faintest provocation.

A sudden distaste for the entire inside of his house seized Ebenezer. He
turned and wandered back down the little dark yard, looking up at the
high field of the stars, with only his dim eyes.

"There must be quite a little to know about them," he thought, "if
anybody was enough interested."

Then he remembered Simeon and Abel, and laughed again in his way.

"I done the town a good turn for once, didn't I?" he thought; "I've
fixed folks so's they can't spend their money fool!"

Two steps from Ebenezer's front gate, Simeon and Abel overtook a woman.
She had a long shawl over her head, and she was humming some faint air
of her own