urly-leaved
and spear-pointed. A warm gust of wind brought mint to his nostrils. A
second plot held a small crab-apple tree covered with pink and orange
globes. A great tortoise-shell cat with two kittens ornamented the
third, and in the middle of the fourth, beside a small wooden table, a
woman sat with her back toward the intruder. On the table were one or
two tin boxes and a yellow earthen dish; in her left hand, raised to
the shoulder-level, was a tall thin bottle, from which an amber fluid
dripped in an almost imperceptibly thin stream; her right arm stirred
vigorously. She was a middle-aged woman with lightly grayed hair--a kind
of premonitory powdering. Over her full skirt of lavender-striped cotton
stuff fell a broad, competent white apron. Except for the thudding of
the spoon against the bowl, and a faint, homely echo of clashing china
and tin, mingled with occasionally raised voices and laughter from some
farther kitchen region, all was utterly, placidly still.

Varian stood chained to the open gate. Something in the calm sun-bathed
picture tugged strongly at his heart. He thought suddenly of his mother
and his Aunt Delia--he had been very fond of Aunt Delia. And what
cookies she used to make! Molasses cookies, brown, moist, and crumbly,
they had sweetened his boyhood.

What was it, that delighted sense of congruity that filled him, every
passing second, with keener familiarity, so strangely tinged with sorrow
and regret? Ah, he had it! He bit his lip as it came clear to him. His
little namesake nephew, dead at eight years old, and dear as only a
dearly loved child can be, had delighted greatly in the Kate Greenaway
pictures that came in "painting-books," with colored prints on alternate
pages and corresponding outlines on the others. Dozens of those books
the boy had cleverly filled in with his little japanned paint-box and
mussy, quill-handled brushes; and the scene before him, the rich tints
of the hedge, the symmetrical little tree brilliant with hundreds of
tiny globes, the big white apron, the lazy yellow cats, and everywhere
the prim rectangular lines so amusingly conventional to accentuate the
likeness, almost choked him with the suddenness of the recognition. They
must have colored that very picture a dozen times, Tommy and he.

Half unconsciously he rested his arms on the top of the gate and drifted
into revery. He forgot that he was at Wilton Bluffs, one of the greatest
of the country palaces, and