ger to all the present conditions of
my existence, wholly ill at ease and out of place amid the familiar
surroundings of my study. I became, in short, the gangling farm boy
my aunt had known, scourged with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands
cracked and sore from the corn husking. I felt the knuckles of my thumb
tentatively, as though they were raw again. I sat again before her
parlor organ, fumbling the scales with my stiff, red hands, while she,
beside me, made canvas mittens for the huskers.

The next morning, after preparing my landlady somewhat, I set out for
the station. When the train arrived I had some difficulty in finding my
aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and it was not until
I got her into the carriage that she seemed really to recognize me. She
had come all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had become black
with soot, and her black bonnet gray with dust, during the journey. When
we arrived at my boardinghouse the landlady put her to bed at once and I
did not see her again until the next morning.

Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance she
considerately concealed. As for myself, I saw my aunt's misshapen figure
with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who
have left their ears and fingers north of Franz Josef Land, or their
health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a
music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter
sixties. One summer, while visiting in the little village among the
Green Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she
had kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all the
village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of
those extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one
sometimes inspires in an angular, spectacled woman of thirty. When she
returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her, and the upshot of
this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the
reproaches of her family and the criticisms of her friends by going with
him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of course, had no money,
had taken a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the
railroad. There they had measured off their quarter section themselves
by driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which they had
tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting off its revolutions. They
built