Golden Hind_ than to this slender,
clear-skinned creature who lay raving and smiling in the bedroom of
Boyd Connoway's cabin.

[Footnote 1: "Chuckies," white pebbles used, in these primitive times,
instead of marbles.]

CHAPTER XVIII

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF AUNT JEN

Never was anything seen like it in our time. I mean the transformation
of Aunt Jen, the hard crabapple of our family, after the entrance of the
Maitland children into the household of Heathknowes. Not that my aunt
had much faith in Irma. She had an art, which my aunt counted uncanny,
indeed savouring of the sin of witchcraft. It mattered not at all what
Irma was given to wear--an old tartan of my grandmother's Highland Mary
days when she was a shepherdess by the banks of Cluden, a severe gown
designed on strictly architectural principles by the unabashed shears of
Aunt Jen herself, a bodice and skirt of my mother's, dovelike in hue and
carrying with them some of her own retiring quality in every line. It
was all the same, with a shred or two of silk, with a little undoing
here, a little tightening there, a broad splash of colour cut from one
of my Uncle Rob's neckcloths--not anywhere, but just in the right
place--Irma could give to all mankind the impression of being the only
person worth looking at in the parish. With these simple means she could
and did make every other girl, though attired in robes that had come all
the way from Edinburgh, look dowdy and countrified.

Also she had the simple manner of those who stand in no fear of any one
taking a liberty with them. Her position was assured. Her beauty spoke
for itself, and as for the old tartan, the slab-sided merino, the
retiring pearl-grey wincey, their late owners did not know them again
when they appeared in the great square Marnhoul pew in the parish
church, which Irma insisted upon occupying.

I think that a certain scandal connected with this, actually caused more
stir in the parish than all the marvel of the appearance of the children
in the Haunted House. And for this reason. Heathknowes was a Cameronian
household. The young men of Heathknowes were looked upon to furnish a
successor to their father as an elder in the little meeting-house down
by the Fords. But with the full permission of my grandmother, and the
tacit sympathy of my grandfather, each Sabbath day Miss Irma and Sir
Louis went in state to the family pew at the parish kirk (a square box
large enough to seat a grand ju