f St. Peter.

When started, however, the good woman could no more "slow down" than her
French pony would stop when its head was turned homewards from market.
So she kept on with the history of the woman down the street.

"Heart disease," she said, nodding with assurance and finality; "and we
know what that is--a start, a shock, a fall, a strain, and pht! off the
poor thing goes. Yes, heart disease, and sometimes with such awful pain.
But so; and yesterday she told me she had only a hundred dollars left.
'Enough to last me through,' she said to me. Poor thing, she lifted up
her eyes with a way she has, as if looking for something she couldn't
find, and she says, as simple as though she was asking about the price
of a bed-tick, 'It won't cost more than fifty dollars to bury me, I
s'pose?' Well, that made me squeamish, for the poor dear's plight came
home to me so clear, and she young enough yet to get plenty out of life,
if she had the chance. So I asked her again about her people--whether I
couldn't send for someone belonging to her. 'There's none that belongs
to me,' she says, 'and there's no one I belong to.'

"I thought very likely she didn't want to tell me about herself; perhaps
because she had done wrong, and her family had not been good to her.
Yet it was right I should try and get her folks to come, if she had any
folks. So I said to her, 'Where was your home?' And now, what do you
think she answered, m'sieu'?' 'Look there,' she said to me, with her
big eyes standing out of her head almost--for that's what comes to her
sometimes when she is in pain, and she looks more handsome then than at
any other time--'Look there,' she said to me, 'it was in heaven, that's
where--my home was; but I didn't know it. I hadn't been taught to know
the place when I saw it.'

"Well, I felt my skin go goosey, for I saw what was going on in her
mind, and how she was remembering what had happened to her some time,
somewhere; but there wasn't a tear in her eyes, and I never saw her
cry-never once, m'sieu'--well, but as brave as brave. Her eyes are
always dry--burning. They're like two furnaces scorching up her face. So
I never found out her history, and she won't have the priest. I believe
that's because she wants to die unknown, and doesn't want to confess. I
never saw a woman I was sorrier for, though I think she wasn't married
to the man that left her. But whatever she was, there's good in her--I
haven't known hundreds of women an