was returning with the doctor, and Patience hailed him from the gate and
demanded news of Mary Ellen.

"Why, all her little girls have the measles," replied Thomas Henry, "and
I had to leave my haying to fetch the doctor."

"I want to know," said Patience.

Being the eldest born, Patience had appropriated to herself two rooms in
the rambling old farmhouse before her brother's marriage, from which
later comers had never dislodged her, and with that innate respect for
the rights and peculiarities of others which was common in the household,
she was left to express her secluded life in her own way. As the habit
of retirement grew upon her she created a world of her own, almost as
curious and more individually striking than the museum of Cluny. There
was not a square foot in her tiny apartment that did not exhibit her
handiwork. She was very fond of reading, and had a passion for the
little prints and engravings of "foreign views," which she wove into her
realm of natural history. There was no flower or leaf or fruit that she
had seen that she could not imitate exactly in wax or paper. All over
the walls hung the little prints and engravings, framed in wreaths of
moss and artificial flowers, or in elaborate square frames made of
pasteboard. The pasteboard was cut out to fit the picture, and the
margins, daubed with paste, were then strewn with seeds of corn and
acorns and hazelnuts, and then the whole was gilded so that the effect
was almost as rich as it was novel. All about the rooms, in nooks and on
tables, stood baskets and dishes of fruit-apples and plums and peaches
and grapes-set in proper foliage of most natural appearance, like enough
to deceive a bird or the Sunday-school scholars, when on rare occasions
they were admitted into this holy of holies. Out of boxes, apparently
filled with earth in the corners of the rooms, grew what seemed to be
vines trained to run all about the cornices and to festoon the pictures,
but which were really strings, colored in imitation of the real vine, and
spreading out into paper foliage. To complete the naturalistic character
of these everlasting vines, which no scale-bugs could assail, there were
bunches of wonderful grapes depending here and there to excite the
cupidity of both bird and child. There was no cruelty in the nature of
Patience, and she made prisoners of neither birds nor squirrels, but
cunning cages here and there held most lifelike counterfeits of their
willing cap