s full of a good traveler's curiosity and
enlightenment. By the time we thought it discreet to join our hostess we
were already sincere friends.

You may speak of a visit's setting in as well as a tide's, and it was
impossible, as Mrs. Todd whispered to me, not to be pleased at the way
this visit was setting in; a new impulse and refreshing of the social
currents and seldom visited bays of memory appeared to have begun.
Mrs. Fosdick had been the mother of a large family of sons and
daughters,--sailors and sailors' wives,--and most of them had died
before her. I soon grew more or less acquainted with the histories of
all their fortunes and misfortunes, and subjects of an intimate nature
were no more withheld from my ears than if I had been a shell on
the mantelpiece. Mrs. Fosdick was not without a touch of dignity and
elegance; she was fashionable in her dress, but it was a curiously
well-preserved provincial fashion of some years back. In a wider sphere
one might have called her a woman of the world, with her unexpected bits
of modern knowledge, but Mrs. Todd's wisdom was an intimation of truth
itself. She might belong to any age, like an idyl of Theocritus; but
while she always understood Mrs. Fosdick, that entertaining pilgrim
could not always understand Mrs. Todd.

That very first evening my friends plunged into a borderless sea of
reminiscences and personal news. Mrs. Fosdick had been staying with a
family who owned the farm where she was born, and she had visited every
sunny knoll and shady field corner; but when she said that it might be
for the last time, I detected in her tone something expectant of the
contradiction which Mrs. Todd promptly offered.

"Almiry," said Mrs. Fosdick, with sadness, "you may say what you like,
but I am one of nine brothers and sisters brought up on the old place,
and we're all dead but me."

"Your sister Dailey ain't gone, is she? Why, no, Louisa ain't gone!"
exclaimed Mrs. Todd, with surprise. "Why, I never heard of that
occurrence!"

"Yes'm; she passed away last October, in Lynn. She had made her distant
home in Vermont State, but she was making a visit to her youngest
daughter. Louisa was the only one of my family whose funeral I wasn't
able to attend, but 'twas a mere accident. All the rest of us were
settled right about home. I thought it was very slack of 'em in Lynn
not to fetch her to the old place; but when I came to hear about it,
I learned that they'd recently put up