Annie Kilburn

because its founder happened to live there, and to believe that it would pay. There was a railroad, and labour of the sort he wanted was cheap and

ers personally pushed a clucking hand-mower in the summer evenings after tea. The fences had been taken away from the new houses, in the taste of some of the Boston suburbs; they generally remained before the old ones, whose inmates resented the ragged effect that their absence gave the street. The irregularity had hitherto been of an orderly and harmonious kind, such as naturally follows the growth of a country road into a village thoroughfare. The dwellings were placed nearer or further from the sidewalk as their builders fancied, and the elms that met in a low arch above the street had an illusive symmetry in the perspective; they were really set at uneven intervals, and in a line that wavered capriciously in and out. The street itself lounged and curved along, widening and contracting

silk cap and his shirt sleeves and spectacles. The station itself, one of Richardson's, massive and low, with red-tiled, spreading veranda roofs, impressed her with its fitness, and strengthened her for her encounter with the business architecture of Hatboro', which was of the florid, ambitious New York type, prevalent with every American town in the early stages of its prosperity. The buildings were of pink brick, faced with granite, and supported in the first story by columns of painted iron; flat-roofed blocks looked down over the low-woode

ed the new town-hall, with which she could find no fault; the Baptist and Methodist churches were the same as of old; the Unitarian church seemed to have shrunk as if the architecture had sympathised with its dwin

n; and she put her head quite out of the carr

hands folded on the muzzle of his gun, as intolerably hackneyed and commonplace. Her conscience, she said, would not let her add another recruit to the regiment of stone soldiers standing about in that posture on the tops of pedestals all over the country; and so, instead of going to an Italian statuary with her fellow-townsmen's letter, and getting him to make the figure they wanted, she doubled the money and gave the commission to a young girl from Kansas, who had come out to develop at R

I be helped to be very humble!" she prayed under her breath. It seemed as if she could not take her eyes from the figure; it was such a modern, such an American shape, so youthfully inadequate, so simple, so sophisticated,

lease," she

ointed with his whip to a church at the other side of t

ge Romanesque pile very much, though it was certainly not bad, but she remembered that Bolton was a membe

the Catholics, and they moved

of a cross where he beckoned, th

the high-school building as they passed, and the Episcopal chapel, of blameless church-ward

that was built bef

shaded road, where the wheels made a pleasant grinding sound, and set himsel

throat, with a conscious air, "as you kno

the monument still. "But I might have heard and forgotten it," she

I don't know's you'd had time to hear

far from satisfactory the Victory was, and formulati

's progressive. I guess they got pretty tired of Mr. Rogers, even before he died; and they kept the supply a-goin' til

, as to have offered to replace at her own expense the Victory with a

so I guess he suits pretty well all round. Of course you can't suit everybody. There's always got to be a dog in the manger, i

mittee, removed the Victory, and had the Volunteer unveiled with

"Did you tell me h

He's from down Penobscotport way,

nument for the moment by her dislike for the name of the new m

at's bound to complain, I don't care what you do to accommodate 'em; and what I done, I done as much to stop their clack as anything, and give him the right sort of a start of

o her, but she only replied with a daze

it up some, anyway, I might as well let him set in the old Judge's room. If you think it was more than I had a right to do, I'm willin' to pay fo

r. Bolton?" cried Miss Kilburn

of violence, "Mr. Peck; I t

k him to

hick nor a child in it before. The child," he continued, partly turning his face round again, and beginning to look Miss Kilburn in the eye, "wa'n't one to touch anything, anyway, and we kep' her

nd deeply furrowed, lighted up with real feeling, which he tried to make go

," she said. "What chil

Pec

asked, with displeasur

Bolton. "But she'd be'n in the as

f; and she fell back upon the seat

he care of her himself; and so, as I say, Mis' Bolton and me we took him in, as much to stop folks' mouths as anything, till they got kinder used to it. But we didn't

y right, Mr. Bolton,

him till he could git settled somehow. I guess he means to go to house-keepin', if he can git the right kind of a house-keeper; he wants an old one. If it was a young one, I guess he wouldn't have any great t

till he had found a suitabl

at," said Bolton. "But I'm '

nd rising again to the wall fencing the grounds from the street. The wall was overhung there by a company of magnificent elms, which turned and formed one side of the

be weak-minded, barked crazily at his master, and then, recognising him, broke into an imbecile whimper, and went back and coiled his rheumatism up in the sun on a warm stone before the door. Mrs

cepted the look, a

es of short tough grass mixed with decaying chips and small weeds underfoot, and the spacious June sky overhead; the fine network and blisters of the cracking and warping white paint on the clapboarding, and the hills beyond

stopped laughing and began to cry; she put away Mrs. Bolton's carefully offered hand, she threw herse

ry of rheumatic apprehension from the sweep of Miss Kilburn's skirts,

e she beat Miss Kilburn's back with her bony palm in sign of sympathy. But the dog went