urtains were of white dimity
with knotted fringe, and her walls were freshly whitewashed. Her framed
sampler, and a memorial picture done with pen and ink, representing two
weeping-willows overshadowing a tombstone, ornamented the high
mantel-piece, and there were also two gayly colored china jars filled
with dried rose-leaves. They were only wild-brier roses; the real roses,
as she called them, grew but reluctantly in this Northern air. Miss Lois
never loved the wild ones as she had loved the old-fashioned
cinnamon-scented pink and damask roses of her youth, but she gathered
and dried these leaves of the brier from habit. There was also hanging
on the wall a looking-glass tilted forward at such an angle that the
looker-in could see only his feet, with a steep ascent of carpet going
up hill behind him. This looking-glass possessed a brightly hued picture
at the top, divided into two compartments, on one side a lovely lady
with a large bonnet modestly concealing her face, very bare shoulders,
leg-of-mutton sleeves, and a bag hanging on her arm; on the other old
Father Time, scythe in hand, as if he was intended as a warning to the
lovely lady that minutes were rapid and his stroke sure.

"Why do you keep your glass tilted forward so far that we can not look
in it, Miss Lois?" Rast had once asked.

Miss Lois did it from habit. But she answered: "To keep silly girls from
looking at themselves while they are pretending to talk to me. They say
something, and then raise their eyes quickly to see how they looked
when they said it. I have known them keep a smile or a particular
expression half a minute while they studied the effect--ridiculous
calves!"

"Calves have lovely eyes sometimes," said Rast.

"Did I say the girls were ugly, Master Pert? But the homely girls look
too."

"Perhaps to see how they can improve themselves."

"Perhaps," said the old maid, dryly. "Pity they never learn!"

In the sitting-room was a high chest of drawers, an old clock, a
chintz-covered settle, and two deep narrow old rocking-chairs, intended
evidently for scant skirts; on an especial table was the family Bible,
containing the record of the Hinsdale family from the date of the
arrival of the _Mayflower_. Miss Lois's prayer-book was not there; it
was up stairs in a bureau drawer. It did not seem to belong to the
old-time furniture of the rooms below, nor to the Hinsdale Bible.

The story of Miss Lois's change from the Puritan to the Episc