good bit when she went up-stairs, but she'd always laugh about it, and
say that when we was rich enough we'd put in an elevator, like they had
at a big hotel we saw once. It would suit her fine, she said, to set
down on a cushioned seat and be up-stairs afore she could git up again.
Now, you needn't think I'm wanderin' from the p'int," and Uncle Jabez
looked severely at Mr. Dickey, who was manifestly fidgeting. "All you
folks that have lived about here all your lives knew Lavina 'ithout my
tellin' you this; but Mr. Birchard he's a stranger in the neighborhood,
and it's needful to the understandin' of my story that he should know
just what sort of a woman she was,--or is, as I should say."

Mr. Dickey subsided, while Mr. Birchard tried to throw still more of an
expression of the deepest interest and attention into his face. He must
have succeeded, for the old man, going on with his story, fixed his eyes
more and more frequently upon those of the young one. They were large,
gentle, appealing blue eyes, with a mildly surprised expression, which
Mr. Birchard found exceedingly attractive. Whether or not the fact that
the youngest of Uncle Jabez's children, a daughter, had precisely
similar eyes, in any way accounted for the attraction, I leave to minds
more astute than my own.

"You may think," the narrator resumed, when he felt that he had settled
Mr. Dickey, "whether or not you'd miss a woman like that, when you'd
summered and wintered with her more'n forty year. She always said she
hoped she'd go sudden, for she was so heavy it would 'a' took three or
four of the common run of folks to lift her, and she dreaded a long
sickness. Well, she was took at her word. We was settin', as it might be
now, one on one side the fire, the other on t'other, in the big
easy-cheers that Samuel--that's our oldest son, and a good boy, if I do
say it--had sent us with the fust spare money he had. She'd been
laughin' and jokin', as she so often did, five minutes afore.
Gracie--she was a little thing then, and, bein' the youngest, a little
sassy and sp'iled, mebbe--had been on a trip to the city, and she'd
brought her ma a present of a shoe-buttoner with a handle a full foot
long.

"'There, ma,' she says, laughin' up in her mother's face; 'you was
complainin' about the distance it seemed to be to your feet: here's a
kind of a telegraft-pole to shorten it a little.'

"My, how we did laugh! And Lavina must needs try it right away, to
please G