ixed upon me, but they did not interfere
with her occupation of knitting; neither did they interrupt her habit
of chewing cloves, flagroot, or grains of rice. If these articles were
not at hand, she chewed a small chip.

"Aunt Merce, poor Hepburn chewed his shoes, when he was in Davis's
Straits."

"Mary, look at that child's stockings."

Mother raised her eyes from the _Boston Recorder_, and the article
she had been absorbed in the proceedings of an Ecclesiastical Council,
which had discussed (she read aloud to Aunt Merce) the conduct of
Brother Thaddeus Turner, pastor of the Congregational Church of
Hyena. Brother Thaddeus had spoken lightly of the difference between
Sprinkling and Immersion, and had even called Hyena's Baptist minister
"_Brother_." He was contumacious at first, was Brother Thaddeus, but
Brother Boanerges from Andover finally floored him.

"Cassandra," said mother, presently, "come here."

I obeyed with reluctance, making a show of turning down a leaf.

"Child," she continued, and her eyes wandered over me dreamily, till
they dropped on my stockings; "why will you waste so much time on
unprofitable stories?"

"Mother, I hate good stories, all but the Shepherd of Salisbury Plain;
I like that, because it makes me hungry to read about the roasted
potatoes the shepherd had for breakfast and supper. Would it make me
thankful if you only gave me potatoes without salt?"

"Not unless your heart is right before God."

"'_The Lord my Shepherd is_,'" sang Aunt Merce.

I put my hands over my ears, and looked defiantly round the room.
Its walls are no longer standing, and the hands of its builders have
crumbled to dust. Some mental accident impressed this picture on the
purblind memory of childhood.

We were in mother's winter room. She was in a low, chintz-covered
chair; Aunt Merce sat by the window, in a straight-backed chair, that
rocked querulously, and likewise covered with chintz, of a red and
yellow pattern. Before the lower half of the windows were curtains of
red serge, which she rattled apart on their brass rods, whenever she
heard a footstep, or the creak of a wheel in the road below. The walls
were hung with white paper, through which ran thread-like stripes of
green. A square of green and chocolate-colored English carpet covered
the middle of the floor, and a row of straw chairs stood around it,
on the bare, lead-colored boards. A huge bed, with a chintz top shaped
like an elephant's back