moves me one way, I cannot go another. But I will try my
best, for may-be it's the last time some of you will ever listen to old
Thusa's tales. She's never felt just right since they tangled up her
heart-strings with that whitened thread. Oh! that was a vile, mean
trick!"

"Forget and forgive, Miss Thusa," cried Louis; "I dare say Mittie has
repented of it in dust and ashes."

"I have forgiven, long ago," resumed Miss Thusa, "but as for
_forgetting_, that is out of the question. Ever since then, when the
bleaching time comes, it keeps me perfectly miserable till it is over.
I've never had any thread equal to it, for I'm afraid to let it stay
long enough to be as powerful white as it used to be. Well, well, let it
rest. You want me to tell you a story, do you?"

Miss Thusa had an auditory assembled round her that might have animated
a spirit less open to inspiration than hers. There was Mr. and Mrs.
Gleason, the latter a fine, dignified-looking lady, and the young
doctor, with his countenance of grave sweetness, and Louis, with an
expression of resolute credulity, and Helen and Alice, with their arms
interlaced, and the locks of their hair mingling like the tendrils of
two forest vines. And what perhaps gave a glow to her spirit, deeper
than the presence of all these, Mittie, her arch enemy, was _not there_,
to mock her with her deriding black eyes.

"You've talked to me so much about not telling you any terrible things,"
said she, with a troubled look, "that you've made me like a candle under
a bushel, instead of a light upon a hill-top. I've never told such
stories since, as I used to tell when the first Mrs. Gleason was alive,
and I spun in the nursery all the evening, and little Helen was the only
one to listen to what I had to say. There was something in the child's
eyes that kept me going, for they grew brighter and larger every word I
said."

Helen looked up, and met the glance of the young doctor, riveted upon
her with so much pity and earnestness, she looked down again with a
blending of gratitude and shame. She well knew that, notwithstanding her
reason now taught her the folly and madness of her superstitious
terrors, the impressions of her early childhood were burnt into her
memory and never could be entirely obliterated.

"I remember a story about a blind child, which I heard myself, when a
little girl," said Miss Thusa, "and if I should live to the age of
Methuselah, I never should forget it. I don't