lways said that this picture was Jean's
masterpiece, and she got the inspiration for it on this day. Kit sat very
erect at her end of the pew, but even she, who prided herself on being
unemotional, had tears on her lashes listening to these dear old-time
scholars reciting the poetry out of their old fourth and fifth readers.

Judge Ellis rose with a radiant light in his eyes and spouted, "At
midnight in his guarded tent, the Turk lay dreaming of the hour," and for
an encore he rolled out "Old Ironsides."

"Ay, tear her tattered ensign down,
Long has it waved on high."

Cousin Roxy obliged with "Woodman, spare that tree," but for an encore she
gave a tender poem of old-time days, called "Twenty Years Ago." Its verses
rang in Kit's head all the way home, and when she learned that Miss
Daphne, too, had been one of the old Professor's scholars, she wrote them
down and sent them west to her.

"I've wandered to the village, Tom,
I've sat beneath the tree,
Upon that schoolhouse playground,
That sheltered you and me.
But few were there to greet me, Tom,
And few were left we know,
Who played with us upon the green,
Just twenty years ago."

"I'll never forget it as long as I live, Cousin Roxy," Kit declared,
fervently; "talk about the twanging of heart strings; why, it seemed to
me as though I could just feel the way you all felt as you sat there. It
was the queerest thing, because Mrs. Peckham is stout and getting gray,
and yet when she got up to recite she actually looked like a plump little
girl with her brown eyes and rosy cheeks. And Deacon Simmons was as boyish
as could be, when he stood there blushing and reading his class paper on
'Old Friendships.'"

"Well, child," said Mrs. Ellis, "I'm glad that you could see a little of
the glory that gave light to us. You'll find out as you grow older and
stand upon life's hills of rest that the days of childhood and going to
school are the sweetest and best that life gives to you. I don't mind
saying that I love every clapboard in the little old red schoolhouse, and
when I read in a magazine the other day that such things were a thing of
the past I wanted to call out that it wasn't any such thing. We had one
right here at our crossroads over a hundred and thirty years old, and
still turning out its hundred per cent. graduates."

The next morning, just after Shad had gone whistling up to the barn, Doris
spied a famili