ows or spinsters, made their evening calls mostly without escort.
The light of a lantern not only enabled one to pick the better side of
a bad road, but would illuminate the face of any male stranger who
might be of a burglarious or murderous disposition. Reba Larrabee was
not a timid person; indeed, she was wont to say that men were so
scarce in Beulah that unless they were out-and-out ruffians it would
be an inspiration to meet a few, even if it were only to pass them in
the middle of the road.

There was a light in the meeting-house as she passed, and then there
was a long stretch of shining white silence unmarked by any human
habitation till she came to the tumble-down black cottage inhabited by
"Door-Button" Davis, as the little old man was called in the village.
In the distance she could see Osh Popham's two-story house brilliantly
illuminated by kerosene lamps, and as she drew nearer she even
descried Ossian himself, seated at the cabinet organ in his
shirt-sleeves, practicing the Christmas anthem, his daughter holding a
candle to the page while she struggled to adjust a circuitous alto to
her father's tenor. On the hither side of the Popham house, and quite
obscured by it, stood Letitia Boynton's one-story gray cottage. It had
a clump of tall cedar trees for background and the bare branches of
the elms in front were hung lightly with snow garlands. As Mrs.
Larrabee came closer, she set down her lantern and looked fixedly at
the familiar house as if something new arrested her gaze.

"It looks like a little night-light!" she thought. "And how queer of
Letty to be sitting at the open window!"

Nearer still she crept, yet not so near as to startle her friend. A
tall brass candlestick, with a lighted tallow candle in it, stood on
the table in the parlor window; but the room in which Letty sat was
unlighted save by the fire on the hearth, which gleamed brightly
behind the quaint andirons--Hessian soldiers of iron, painted in gay
colors. Over the mantel hung the portrait of Letty's mother, a benign
figure clad in black silk, the handsome head topped by a snowy muslin
cap with floating strings. Just round the corner of the fireplace was
a half-open door leading into a tiny bedroom, and the flickering flame
lighted the heads of two sleeping children, arms interlocked, bright
tangled curls flowing over one pillow.

Letty herself sat in a low chair by the open window wrapped in an old
cape of ruddy brown homespun, from