be "in
condition". When it was, it was as velvety and mellow as a bell far off,
and the old ballads and chansons used to fill the twilight. We used even
to forget then that she was an old maid. Now and then she sang songs
that no one else had ever heard. They were her own; she had composed
both the words and the air. At other times she sang the songs of others
to her own airs. I remember the first time I ever heard of Tennyson
was when, one evening in the twilight, she sang his echo song from "The
Princess". The air was her own, and in the refrain you heard perfectly
the notes of the bugle, and the echoes answering, "Dying, dying, dying."
Boy as I was, I was entranced, and she answered my enthusiasm by turning
and repeating the poem. I have often thought since how musical her voice
was as she repeated

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever.

She had a peculiarly sentimental temperament. As I look back at it all
now, she was much given to dwelling upon old-time poems and romances,
which we thought very ridiculous in any one, especially in a spinster of
forty odd. She would stop and talk about the branch of a tree with the
leaves all turning red or yellow or purple in the common way in which,
as everyone knows, leaves always turn in the fall; or even about a
tangle of briers, scarlet with frost, in a corner of an old worm-fence,
keeping us waiting while she fooled around a brier patch with old
Blinky, who would just as lief have been in one place as another, so it
was out of doors; and even when she reached the house she would still
carry on about it, worrying us by telling over again just how the boughs
and leaves looked massed against the old gray fence, which she could do
till you could see them precisely as they were. She was very aggravating
in this way. Sometimes she would even take a pencil or pen and a sheet
of paper for old Blinky, and reproduce it. She could not draw, of
course, for she was not a painter; all she could do was to make anything
look almost just like it was.

There was one thing about her which excited much talk; I suppose it was
only a piece of old-maidism. Of course she was religious. She was really
very good. She was considered very high church. I do not think, from
my recollection of her, that she really was, or, indeed, that she could
have been; but she used to talk that way, and it was said that she was.
In fact, it used to be whispered that she was in da