ng, when the snow would disappear, and the
honeysuckle would flower, and the wrens would again occupy the old
teapots hung in the vines of the dining-room porch.

The things that made the people of Almont interesting to each other and
drew them together meant nothing to Abbie Snover. When she had become
too old to be asked in marriage by any one, she had stopped going to
dances and to sleigh-rides, and no one had asked her why. Then she had
left the choir.

Except when she went to do her marketing, Abbie was never seen on the
streets.

For fifteen years after Amos Snover died, Abbie and Old Chris lived
alone in the big house. Every Saturday morning, as her mother had done
before her, Abbie went to the grocery store, to the butcher shop, and to
"Newberry's." She always walked along the East side of Main Street, Old
Chris, with the market-basket, following about three feet behind her.
And every Saturday night Old Chris went down-town to sit in the back of
Pot Lippincott's store and visit with Owen Frazer, who drove in from the
sixty acres he farmed as a "renter" at Mile Corners. Once every week
Abbie made a batch of cookies, cutting the thin-rolled dough into the
shape of leaves with an old tin cutter that had been her mother's. She
stored the cookies in the shiny tin pail that stood on the shelf in the
clothes-press of the downstairs bedroom, because that was where her
mother had always kept them, to be handy and yet out of reach of the
hired help. And when Jennie Sanders's children came to her door on their
way home from school she gave them two cookies each, because her mother
had always given her two.

Once every three months "the Jersey girls," dressed in black broadcloth,
with black, fluted ruffles around their necks, and black-flowered
bonnets covering their scanty hair, turned the corner at Chase's Lane,
walked three blocks to the foot of Tilson Street, and rang Abbie
Snover's door-bell.

As Old Chris grew older and less able, Abbie was compelled to close off
first one room and then another; but Old Chris still occupied the back
chamber near the upstairs woodroom, and Abbie still slept in the South
bedroom.

Early one October afternoon, Jim East, Almont's express agent and keeper
of the general store, drove his hooded delivery cart up to the front
steps of the big house. He trembled with excitement as he climbed down
from the seat.

"Abbie Snover! Ab--bie!" he called. "I got somethin' for you! A package