lowing the bows round under her hair, to be sure they "canted right."
"I guess they wouldn't ha' done it if they hadn't."

"There's one thing Mis' Hilton says to me when she passed me the check,"
Martha brought out, in sudden recollection. "'Now here's this money we
made for you,' she says. 'Use it anyways you want, so 's you use it for
the church. But,' she says, 'why don't you make up your minds now you'll
give some kind of an entertainment after we're gone, a harvest
festival,' she says, 'or the like o' that? Then you could do your
paintin',' she says, 'an' get you a new melodeon for the Sunday School,
or whatever 'tis you want. We've showed you the way,' she says. 'Now you
go ahead an' see what you can do.'"

Lydia Vesey looked as if she might, in another instant, cap the
suggestion by a satirical climax, and Ellen Bayliss rested her sewing
hand on her knee and glanced thoughtfully about as if to ask, in her
still, earnest way, what her own part could be in such an enterprise.
But a step came hurrying down the stairs, the step of a heavy body
lightly carried, and Caddie Musgrave came in at a flying pace. It was
Caddie who, with the help of her silent husband, kept the big
boarding-house on the hill. No need to talk to her about summer
boarders, she was wont to say. She knew 'em, egg an' bird. Take 'em as
folks an' nobody was better, but 'twas boarders she meant. They might
seem different, fust sight, but shake 'em up in a peck measure, an' you
couldn't tell t'other from which.

"I guess you're tired," said Ellen Bayliss, in her gentle fashion,
taking a stolen glance from the embroidery and returning again at once
to her careful stitches.

"Tired!" said Caddie. She dropped into a chair and leaned her head back
with ostentatious weariness. "I guess I be. An' yet I told Charlie 'fore
they went I never'd say I was tired again in all my born days, only let
me get rid of 'em this time."

"How'd you manage with 'em this season?" asked Mrs. Pray, as if her
question concerned the importation of some alien plant.

Caddie opened her eyes and came to a posture more adapted to sustaining
her end of the conversational burden.

"Why, they're all right," she owned, "good as gold, take 'em on their
own ground. I found out they were good as gold that winter I went up an'
passed Sunday with Mis' Denny. But take 'em together, boardin', an' what
one don't think of t'other will. This summer 'twas growin' fleshy, an'
if they didn'