there had been ten children, and
she had lost four. She did not visibly shrink from the pursuit of the
sympathy which expressed itself in curiosity as to the sickness they
had died of; the ladies left her with the belief that they had met a
character, and she remained with the conviction, briefly imparted to her
husband, that they were tonguey.

The summer folks came more and more, every year, with little variance in
the impression on either side. When they told her that her maple sugar
would sell better if the cake had an image of Lion's Head stamped on it,
she answered that she got enough of Lion's Head without wanting to see
it on all the sugar she made. But the next year the cakes bore a rude
effigy of Lion's Head, and she said that one of her boys had cut the
stamp out with his knife; she now charged five cents a cake for the
sugar, but her manner remained the same. It did not change when the
excursionists drove away, and the deep silence native to the place
fell after their chatter. When a cock crew, or a cow lowed, or a horse
neighed, or one of the boys shouted to the cattle, an echo retorted
from the granite base of Lion's Head, and then she had all the noise she
wanted, or, at any rate, all the noise there was most of the time. Now
and then a wagon passed on the stony road by the brook in the valley,
and sent up its clatter to the farm-house on its high shelf, but
there was scarcely another break from the silence except when the
coaching-parties came.

The continuous clash and rush of the brook was like a part of the
silence, as the red of the farm-house and the barn was like a part of
the green of the fields and woods all round them: the black-green of
pines and spruces, the yellow-green of maples and birches, dense to
the tops of the dreary hills, and breaking like a bated sea around the
Lion's Head. The farmer stooped at his work, with a thin, inward-curving
chest, but his wife stood straight at hers; and she had a massive beauty
of figure and a heavily moulded regularity of feature that impressed
such as had eyes to see her grandeur among the summer folks. She was
forty when they began to come, and an ashen gray was creeping over the
reddish heaps of her hair, like the pallor that overlies the crimson of
the autumnal oak. She showed her age earlier than most fair people, but
since her marriage at eighteen she had lived long in the deaths of the
children she had lost. They were born with the taint of their