t' receptions. As they grow
older, they are asked with the preachers and widows for the first night
of a series of parties at a house to get them out of the way and over
with before the young folks come later in the week. When they get to a
point where the young folks laugh and clap their hands at little pudgy
daddy when he dances 'Old Dan Tucker' at the big parties in the brick
houses, it's all up with them--they are old married folks, and the next
step takes them to the old folks' whist club, where the bankers' wives
and the insurance widows run things. That is the inner sanctuary, the
holy of holies in the society of this town."

After a pause Aunt Martha added: "You'd think, to hear these chosen
people talk, that the benighted souls who go to missionary teas, Woman's
Relief Corps chicken-pie suppers, and get up bean-dinners for the church
on election day, live on another planet. Yet I guess we're all made of
the same kind of mud.

"That reminds me of the Winthrops. When they came here, back in the
sixties, it happened to be Fourth of July, and the band was out playing
in the grove by the depot. Mrs. Winthrop got off the train quite grandly
and bowed and waved her hand to the band, and the Judge walked over and
gave the band leader five dollars. They said afterward that they felt
deeply touched to find a raw Western town so appreciative of the coming
of an old New England family, that it greeted them with a band. Before
Mrs. Winthrop had been here three weeks she called on me, 'as one of the
first ladies of the town,' she said, to organise and see if we couldn't
break up the habit of the hired girls eating at the table with the
family." Aunt Martha smiled and her eyes glittered as she added: "After
they organised, the titled aristocracy of this town did their own work
and sent the washing out for a year or more."

The talk drifted back to the old days, and Aunt Martha got out her
photograph-album and showed Miss Larrabee the pictures of those whom she
called "the rude forefathers of the village," in their quaint old
costumes of war-times. In the book were baby pictures of middle-aged
men and women, and youthful pictures of the old men and women of
the town. But most interesting of all to Miss Larrabee were the
daguerreotypes--quaint old portraits in their little black boxes, framed
in plush and gilt. The old woman brought out picture after picture--her
husband's among the others, in a broad beaver hat with a high c