more than ever to be found, when in
Coniston, in the garden or the kitchen behind the store. Yes, Aunt Listy
is dead. She has flitted through these pages as she flitted through life
itself, arrayed by Jethro like the rainbow, and quite as shadowy and
unreal. There is no politician of a certain age in the state who does
not remember her walking, clad in dragon-fly colors, through the streets
of the capital on Jethro's arm, or descending the stairs of the Pelican
House to supper. None of Jethro's detractors may say that he ever failed
in kindness to her, and he loved her as much as was in his heart to love
any woman after Cynthia Ware. As for Aunt Listy, she never seemed to
feel any resentment against the child Jethro brought so frequently to
Thousand Acre Hill. Poor Aunt Listy! some people used to wonder whether
she ever felt any emotion at all. But I believe that she did, in her own
way.

It is a well-known fact that Mr. Bijah Bixby came over from Clovelly, to
request the place of superintendent of the funeral, a position which had
already been filled. A special office, too, was created on this occasion
for an old supporter of Jethro's, Senator Peleg Hartington of Brampton.
He was made chairman of the bearers, of whom Ephraim Prescott was one.

After this, as we have said, Jethro was more than ever at the store--or
rather in that domestic domain behind it which Wetherell and Cynthia
shared with Miss Millicent Skinner. Moses Hatch was wont to ask Cynthia
how her daddies were. It was he who used to clear out the road to the
little schoolhouse among the birches when the snow almost buried the
little village, and on sparkling mornings after the storms his oxen
would stop to breathe in front of the store, a cluster of laughing
children clinging to the snow-plough and tumbling over good-natured
Moses in their frolics. Cynthia became a country girl, and grew long and
lithe of limb, and weather-burnt, and acquired an endurance that spoke
wonders for the life-giving air of Coniston. But she was a serious
child, and Wetherell and Jethro sometimes wondered whether she was ever
a child at all. When Eben Hatch fell from the lumber pile on the ice,
it was she who bound the cut in his head; and when Tom Richardson
unexpectedly embraced the schoolhouse stove, Cynthia, not Miss Rebecca
Northcutt, took charge of the situation.

It was perhaps inevitable, with such a helpless father, that the girl
should grow up with a sense of responsi