ercies for ourselves and our children!

There really is a Dorcas Society, as you and I well know, and one
not unlike that in these pages; and you and I have lived through many
discouraging, laughable, and beautiful experiences while we emulated the
Bible Dorcas, that woman "full of good works and alms deeds."

There never was a Peabody Pew in the Tory Hill Meeting-House, and
Nancy's love story and Justin's never happened within its century-old
walls, but I have imagined only one of the many romances that have had
their birth under the shadow of that steeple, did we but realize it.

As you have sat there on open-windowed Sundays, looking across purple
clover-fields to blue distant mountains, watching the palm-leaf fans
swaying to and fro in the warm stillness before sermon time, did not the
place seem full of memories, for has not the life of two villages ebbed
and flowed beneath that ancient roof? You heard the hum of droning
bees and followed the airy wings of butterflies fluttering over
the grave-stones in the old churchyard, and underneath almost every
moss-grown tablet some humble romance lies buried and all but forgotten.

If it had not been for you, I should never have written this story, so I
give it back to you tied with a sprig from Ophelia's nosegay; a sprig of
"rosemary, that's for remembrance."

K. D. W.

August, 1907

I. The Old Peabody Pew

Edgewood, like all the other villages along the banks of the Saco,
is full of sunny slopes and leafy hollows. There are little, rounded,
green-clad hillocks that might, like their scriptural sisters, "skip
with joy"; and there are grand, rocky hills tufted with gaunt pine
trees--these leading the eye to the splendid heights of a neighbor
State, where snow-crowned peaks tower in the blue distance, sweeping the
horizon in a long line of majesty.

Tory Hill holds its own among the others for peaceful beauty and fair
prospect, and on its broad, level summit sits the white-painted Orthodox
Meeting-House. This faces a grassy common where six roads meet, as if
the early settlers had determined that no one should lack salvation
because of a difficulty in reaching its visible source.

The old church has had a dignified and fruitful past, dating from that
day in 1761 when young Paul Coffin received his call to preach at a
stipend of fifty pounds sterling a year; answering "that never having
heard of any Uneasiness among the people about his Doctrine or manner of