due course, as well as later a revulsion of feeling and an anxious
watching for the mails, hope deferred, and sickness of heart.

Friday came. The journey, miserable as was its object, was accomplished,
and Stillton, in all its tomb-like silence and drowsy do-nothingness,
with its few glaring white houses and its one dusty road, offering no
apology or explanation whatever for its purposeless existence, at last
was reached, and Farmer Galusha Krinklebottom, in accordance with Dr.
Nevercure's arrangements, met the jaded travellers at the station in his
rickety shay, prepared to take them over to the cottage.

"'Tain't more'n three mile," he said consolingly. "The roads ain't none
too good this season, an' Kittie--that's _her_" (pointing to his
mare)--"don't feel over-skittish; she's nigh onter fourteen year, an'
right smart, too, fur her age, but sorter broken-winded latterly; but I
guess we'll make it afore dark.--Go 'long, Kittie!"

The ancient mare started off. Her fore-legs were stiff and jointless,
her hip-bones painfully prominent, her ribs sadly bare, and her nose
hung dejectedly toward the ground; but she still possessed some
mechanical power of locomotion, and the "shay" began to squeak and
rattle in her wake. Galusha was proud of his native hamlet. "That
there's our meetin'-house," he said, but its whitewash and green blinds
did not seem to excite the travellers' admiration. "An' that longish
house yonder's Pincus's."

"Pincus's?" asked Mabel, with a yawn.

"Pincus Sass's, mum. 'Tis the hotel, mum. That's him in the door.
Hulloa, Pincus!" he shouted, shooting a line of tobacco-juice over the
dash-board.

"Haow, Galusha!" came in nasal accents from the door-way. "Who ye got in
the phayton?"

"The folks as has took the cottage yonder!" called back Galusha.

"Humph! I'll be dummed!" was Pincus's audible comment as the shay
rattled on.

"Yonder's the store," presently added Galusha, pointing with his two
feet of whip-stock to a place placarded with patent-medicine
advertisements, and apparently the rendezvous for all the
tobacco-chewers of the neighborhood.

"And the post-office?" asked Mabel timidly.

"In the store, mum. Barton Bump's our pos'master. Some'at of a man,
Barton is. He was 'p'inted by the Pres'dent 'imself. Barton fit in the
war, yer see, an' I 'spect Gen'ral Grant took a powerful shine to him.
He made him pos'master fust thing."

The greatness of Barton Bump did not seem to impress th