th a momentary twinkle in his old eyes.

While still hesitating over her future course, illness struck down the
old maid, and her life-work was at last decided for her: it was merely
to lie in bed, motionless, winter and summer, with folded hands and
whatever resignation she was able to muster. Niece Lois, hitherto a
satellite, now assumed the leadership. This would seem a simple enough
charge, the household of two women, poor in purse, in a remote village
on a Northern frontier. But exotics of any kind require nursing and
vigilance, and the Hinsdale household was an exotic. Miss Priscilla
required that every collar should be starched in the New England
fashion, that every curtain should fall in New England folds, that every
dish on the table should be of New England origin, and that every clock
should tick with New England accuracy. Lois had known no other training;
and remembering as she did also the ways of the old home among the New
Hampshire hills with a child's fidelity and affection, she went even
beyond her aunt in faithfulness to her ideal; and although the elder
woman had long been dead, the niece never varied the habits or altered
the rules of the house which was now hers alone.

"A little New England homestead strangely set up here on this far
Western island," William Douglas had said.

The church house, as the villagers named it, was built by the
Presbyterian missionaries, many of them laboring with their own hands at
the good work, seeing, no doubt, files of Indian converts rising up in
another world to call them blessed. When it came into the hands of Miss
Priscilla, it came, therefore, ready-made as to New England ideas of
rooms and closets, and only required a new application of white and
green paint to become for her an appropriate and rectangular bower. It
stood near the closed meeting-house, whose steeple threw a slow-moving
shadow across its garden, like a great sun-dial, all day. Miss Lois had
charge of the key of the meeting-house, and often she unlocked its door,
went in, and walked up and down the aisle, as if to revive the memories
of the past. She remembered the faith and sure hope that used to fill
the empty spaces, and shook her head and sighed. Then she upbraided
herself for sighing, and sang in her thin husky voice softly a verse or
two of one of their old psalms by way of reparation. She sent an annual
report of the condition of the building to the Presbyterian Board of
Missions, but in