ets in her brusque, downright way: "I should have liked to kep'
her if she'd lived to be a hundred, but I don't wish her back. She'd
had considerable many strokes, and she couldn't help herself much of
any. She'd got to be rising eighty, and her mind was a good deal
broke," she added conclusively, after a short silence; while Cynthia
looked sorrowfully out of the window, and we heard the sound of
Georgie's axe at the other side of the house, and the wild, sweet
whistle of a bird that flew overhead. I suppose one of the sisters was
just as sorry as the other in reality.

"Now I want you and Georgie to stop and have some tea. I'll get it
good and early," said Hannah, starting suddenly from her chair, and
beginning to bustle about again, after she had asked me about some
people at home whom she knew. "Cynthy! Perhaps she'd like to walk
round out doors a spell. It's breezing up, and it'll be cooler than it
is in the house.--No: you needn't think I shall be put out by your
stopping; but you'll have to take us just as we be. Georgie always
calculates to stop when he comes up. I guess he's made off for the
woods. I see him go across the lot a few minutes ago."

So Cynthia put on a discouraged-looking gingham sun-bonnet, which
drooped over her face, and gave her a more appealing look than ever,
and we went over to the pine-woods, which were beautiful that day. She
showed me a little waterfall made by a brook that came over a high
ledge of rock covered with moss, and here and there tufts of fresh
green ferns. It grew late in the afternoon, and it was pleasant there
in the shade, with the noise of the brook and the wind in the pines,
that sounded like the sea. The wood-thrushes began to sing,--and who
could have better music?

Miss Cynthia told me that it always made her think of once when she
was a little girl to hear the thrushes. She had run away, and fallen
into the ma'sh; and her mother had sent her to bed quick as she got
home, though it was only four o'clock. And she was so ashamed, because
there was company there,--some of her father's folks from over to
Eliot; and then she heard the thrushes begin to call after a while,
and she thought they were talking about her, and they knew she had
been whipped and sent to bed. "I'd been gone all day since morning. I
had a great way of straying off in the woods," said she. "I suppose
mother was put to it when she see me coming in, all bog-mud, right
before the company."

We came