own! There's some one at the
door! You'd better come down, Mr. Peet!"

"It's just Mary Cary!" I called. "Miss Bray sent me, Mrs. Peet. She
wants some cherry-bounce."

"Oh, all right, Mr. Peet. You needn't bother to come down. It's just
little Mary Cary." And she opened the door a tiny crack and peeped
through.

"Mr. Peet isn't very well to-night," she said. "He's taken fresh cold.
But you can come in."

I came; but I didn't want to. And if Mr. Peet had come down those steps
and shaken hands I wouldn't have been surprised. It's certainly strange
how something you know isn't true seems true; and Mr. Peet, dead forty
years, seemed awful alive that night. Every minute I thought he'd walk
in.

She likes you to think he's living at night. Every day she goes to his
grave, which is in the churchyard right next to where she lives; but at
night he comes back to life to her. She's so lonely, I think it's
beautiful that he comes.

I make out like I think he comes, too, and I always send him my love,
and ask how his rheumatism is. I tell you, Martha don't dare smile when
I do it. She don't even want to.

And, don't you know, old Mrs. Peet sent me a Christmas present, too. A
pair of mittens. She knit them herself. It was awful nice of her.

I don't know how big the check was that Miss Katherine's billionaire
brother sent her to spend on the children's Christmas, but it must have
been a corker. The things she bought with it cost money, and the change
it made in the Asylum was Cinderellary. It was.

She bought a carpet for the parlor, and some curtains for the windows,
and a bookcase of books.

For the dining-room she bought six new tables and sixty chairs. They
were plain, but to sit at a table with only ten at it instead of forty,
as I'd been sitting for many years, was to have a proud sensation in
your stomach. Mine got so gay I couldn't eat at the first meal.

To have a chair all to yourself, after sitting on benches so old they
were worn on both edges, was to feel like the Queen of Sheba, and I felt
like her. I could have danced up and down the table, but instead I said
grace over and over inside. I had something to say it for. All of us
did.

Besides a present, each of us had a new dress. It was made of
worsted--real worsted, not calico; and that morning after breakfast, and
after everything had been cleaned up, we put on our new dresses and came
down in the parlor.

And such a fire as there was in it!

It spu