ose to a perfect
storm of a wail.

Just at that moment, down the short platform an electric light, that was
so feeble that it seemed to show a pine-knot influence in its heredity,
was turned on by the station-agent, who was so slow that I perceived the
influence of a descent from old Mr. Territt, who drove the stage that
came down from the city before the war, and my fellow-sufferer stood
revealed.

She was a slim, red-haired bunch of galatea, stylish of cut as to
upturned nose and straight little skirt but wholly and defiantly unshod
save for a dusty white rag around one pink toe. A cunning little straw
bonnet, with an ecru lace jabot dangled in her hand, and her big brown
eyes reminded me of Jane's at her most inquisitive moments.

"If you was on a train, what did you git offen it _here_ for?" she
demanded of me, with both scorn and curiosity in her positive young
voice.

"I don't know why," I answered weakly, not at all in the tone of a
young-gallant-home-from-the-war mood I had intended to assume towards
the first inhabitant of my native town to whom I addressed a remark.

"We was all a-goin' down to Hillsboro, to visit Aunt Bettie Pollard for
a whole week, to Cousin Tom's wedding, but my family is too slow for
nothing but a funeral. And Cousin James, he's worse. He corned for us
ten minutes behind the town clock, and Mammy Dilsie had phthisic, so I
had to fix the two twins, and we're done left. I wisht I didn't have no
family!" And with her bare feet the young rebel raised a cloud of dust
that rose and settled on my skirt.

"There they come now," she continued, with the pained contempt still
rising in her voice.

And around the corner of the station hurried the family party, with all
the haste they would have been expected to use if they had not, just two
minutes earlier, beheld their train go relentlessly on down the valley
to Hillsboro and the wedding celebration. I hadn't placed the kiddie,
but I might have known, from her own description of her family, to whom
she belonged.

First came Sallie Carruthers, sailing along in the serene way that I
remembered to have always thought like a swan in no hurry, and in her
hands was a wet box from which rose sterns protruded.

Next in the procession came Aunt Dilsie, huge and black and wheezing,
fanning herself with a genteel turkey-tail fan, and carrying a large
covered basket.

But the tail-piece of the procession paralyzed all the home-coming
emotions that