d
the two old ladies were presently laughing and crying at once. At every
dwelling they lingered long, and went on reluctantly with many backward
glances, and all their speech was but a repetition of, "Don't you
remember this?" and "Do you remember that?"

Mrs Slater, having left Hilton but recently, was able to explain just
what had been removed, replaced, or altered subsequent to Miss
Ludington's flight. The general appearance of the old street, Mrs. Slater
said, remained much the same, despite the changes which had driven Miss
Ludington away; but new streets had been opened up, and the population of
the village had trebled, and become largely foreign.

In their slow progress they came at last to the school-house.

The door was ajar, and they entered on tiptoe, like tardy scholars. With
a glance of mutual intelligence they hung their hats, each on the one of
the row of wooden pegs in the entry, which had been hers as a
school-girl, and through the open door entered the silent school-room and
sat down in the self-same seats in which two maidens, so unlike them, yet
linked to them by so strangely tender a tie, had reigned as school-room
belles nearly half a century before. In hushed voices, with moist eyes;
and faces shining with the light of other days, those grey-haired women
talked together of the scenes which that homely old room had witnessed,
the long-silent laughter, and the voices, no more heard on earth, with
which it had once echoed.

There in the corner stood a great wrought-iron stove, the counterpart of
the one around whose red-hot sides they had shivered, in their short
dresses, on cold winter mornings. On the walls hung the quaint maps of
that period whence they had received geographical impressions, strangely
antiquated now. Along one side of the room ran a black-board, on which
they had been wont to demonstrate their ignorance of algebra and geometry
to the complete satisfaction of the master, while behind them as they sat
was a row of recitation benches, associated with so many a trying ordeal
of school-girl existence.

"Do you ever think where the girls are in whose seats we are sitting?"
said Mrs. Slater, musingly. "I can remember myself as a girl, more or
less distinctly, and can even be sentimental about her; but it doesn't
seem to me that I am the same person at all; I can't realize it."

"Of course you can't realize it. Why should you expect to realize what is
not true?" replied Miss Luding