she had amused, provoked, and tyrannized over
Anthy's father, troubled his digestion with pies, and given him
innumerable items for the _Star_. She was as good as any reporter.

On this particular autumn morning Mrs. Parker was unusually quiet, for
her. She evidently had something on her mind. She had called upstairs
only once:

"Anthy, where did you put the cinnamon?"

Now, Anthy, as usual, upon this intimation, for old Mrs. Parker never
deigned to ask directly what she was to do, had come downstairs, and by
an adroit, verbal passage-at-arms, in which both of them, I think,
delighted, had diverted her intention of making pumpkin pies and centred
her interest upon a less ambitious pudding. On this occasion Mrs.
Parker did not even offer to tell the story suggested by the catchword
"cinnamon," of how a certain Flora Peters--you know, the Peterses of
Hawleyville, cousins of the Hewletts--had once used pepper for cinnamon
in a pie.

Anthy was fond of these mornings at home, especially just such crispy
autumn mornings as this one. She loved to go about busily, a white cap
over her bright hair, the windows upstairs all wide open to the
sunshine, the cool breezes blowing in. She loved to have the beds spread
open, and the rugs up, and plenty to do. At such times, and often also
in the spring when she was working in her garden, she would break into
bits of song, just snatches here and there, or she would whistle. In
these moments of unconscious activity one might catch fleeting glimpses
of the hidden Anthy. I like, somehow, more than almost anything else, to
think of her as I saw her, a very few times, on occasions like these.

One song, or part of a song, I once heard her sing in an unguarded
moment, a bit of old ballad in a haunting minor key, springs at this
moment so clear in my memory that I can hear the very cadences of her
voice. I don't know where the words came from, or what the song was,
nor yet the music of it:

"It is not for a false lover
That I go sad to see,
But it is for a weary life
Beneath the greenwood tree."

Bits of poetry were always coming to the surface with Anthy. I remember
once, that very fall, as we were walking down the long lane homeward one
Sunday afternoon from my farm, how Anthy, who had been silent for some
time, suddenly made the whole world of that October day newly beautiful:

"The sweet, calm sunshine of October now
Warms the low spot; upon its grassy mould
T