ladies to see," Calliope had said.

"Oh," said Grandma Holly, and she laid her brown hand on Viola's hand,
"ain't she _dear an' little an' young_?"

"I wish't she'd talk some," begged old Mis' Norris.

"Ain't she good, though, the little thing?" Mis' Ailing said. "Look at
how still she sets. Not wigglin' 'round same as some. It was just that
way with Sam when he was small--he'd set by the hour an' leave me hold
him--"

A little bent creature, whose name I never learned, sat patting Viola's
skirt.

"Seems like I'd gone back years," we heard her say.

Grandma Holly held up one half-closed hand.

"Like that," she told them, "my Amy's feet was so little I could hold
'em like that, an' I see hers is the same way. She's wonderful like Amy
was, her age."

I cannot recall half the sweet, trivial things that they said. But I
remember how they told us stories of their own babies, and we laughed
with them over treasured sayings of long-ago lips, or grieved with them
over silences, or rejoiced at glad things that had been. Regardless of
the Proudfit party, we let them talk as they would, and remember. Then
of her own accord Nita Ordway hummed some haunting air, and sang one of
the songs that we all loved--the grandma ladies and Calliope and I. It
was a sleepy song, whose words I have forgotten, but it was in a kind of
universal tongue which I think that no one can possibly mistake. And out
of the lullaby came all the little spirits, freed in babyhood or
"man-grown," and stood at the knees of the grandma ladies, so that I was
afraid that they could not bear it.

When the song was done, Viola suddenly sat up very straight.

"I got a litty box," she announced, "an' I had a parasol. An' once a boy
div me a new nail. An' once I didn' feel berry well, but now I am. An'
once--"

Their laughter was like a caress. Before it was done, we heard a
stamping without, and there was Jimmy Sturgis, with a spray of holly in
his old felt hat and the closed 'bus at the door.

We helped Calliope to get their wraps and to fill the 'bus with hot
stones from the oven and with many quilts, and we made ready a basket of
pop-corn and apples and of the cedar hung around the little room. They
stood about us to say good-by, or to tell us some last bit of the news
of their long-past youth--dear, wrinkled faces framed in broad lines of
bonnet or hood, and smiling, every one.

"This gray shawl I got on me is the very one I used to wrap Amy in to
c