row young instead of growin' old?" She paused,
and I felt the distance of a lifetime growing up between us.

Presently she came out of her reverie, smiling brightly. "We're
lookin' at the same things, honey," she said, "but you see jest one
thing, and I'm seein' double all the time. You see this square with
the park in the middle and the fine four-and five-story buildin's all
around it, and I see it, too; but back of it I can see the old square
with the court-house in the middle of it and the scraggly locust-trees
growin' around it and the market-house back of it. That market-house
wasn't much to look at, but the meat they sold there was the sort a
king can't git nowadays. And there was the clerk's office in front of
the court-house, and the county clerk used to stand on the door-step
and call out the names of the witnesses that was wanted when they was
tryin' a case in court. I can see him now, holdin' up a piece o' paper
to read the names off, and the sun shinin' on his gray head. And that
three-story hotel over yonder on the corner--that used to be the old
tavern in the days when there wasn't any railroad, and the stage'd
come rumblin' up, and everybody'd come runnin' to their front doors to
see who the passengers was.

"The town was so quiet in them days, child, that you could lay down in
the court-house yard and go to sleep, and so little that if you put
your head out o' the winder and hollered for John Smith, you'd be
pretty certain to git John Smith. If he didn't hear you, some of his
neighbors would, and they'd hunt him up for you. Things wasn't as well
kept then as they are now. I ricollect the jimson-weeds growin' in the
court-house yard, and one year the dog-fennel was so plentiful that
Uncle Jim Matthews says to me, says he, 'It looks to me like the
Smiths and the Joneses and the dog-fennel are about to take the
town.'"

She laughed gaily and handed the reins to me. "And now, child, we've
got to make tracks for home, unless we want to be out after sundown."

As we passed out of the square, our faces turned homeward, I noticed
an old Gothic church on the corner of the street leading to the
court-house.

"There's another thing that ain't changed much," said Aunt Jane, with
great satisfaction in her voice. "The inside's all new, and there's a
new congregation, for all the old congregation's lyin' out in the new
cemetery or the old graveyard. But there's the same walls standin' and
lookin' jest like they d