pecting to hear every day of another of them Thompson children being
stricken down; and I was very sorry indeed, Mrs. Cliff, to see, this
very morning, Willy Croup coming out of Barney Thompson's house and to
hear from her afterwards that she had been to order him to come here to
put up a new kitchen door, which I do not suppose is absolutely needed,
and even if it is, I am sure I would wait a good while before I would
have Barney Thompson come into my house with diphtheria, that very
minute, perhaps, in the throats of one or maybe more of his children;
but of course, if people choose to trifle with their own lives, it is
their own business."

"It was not real diphtheria," said Willy Croup, who happened to be
passing the open door at this moment; "it was only a bad sore throat,
and the child was well in two days."

"I suppose, of course," said Miss Shott, "that if the disease did get
into this house, Willy Croup would be the first to take it, because she
is such a spongy person that she takes almost anything that is in the
air and is not wholesome; but then you would not want to lose her, and
after a funeral in the house, no matter whose it may be, things is
always gloomy for a long time afterwards, and nobody can feel easy if it
was a catchin' disease that the person died of."

Mrs. Cliff was naturally desirous to hear all the domestic news of the
town, but she would have liked to have had something pleasant thrown in
among the gloomy tidings of which Miss Shott had made herself the
bearer, and so she made a little effort to turn the conversation.

"I shall be glad to go about and see my old friends and neighbors," she
said, "for I am interested in everything which has happened to them; but
I suppose it will be some days before I can settle down and feel ready
to go on in the old way. It seems to me as if I had been on the move
ever since I left here, although, of course, I was not travelling all
the time."

"I suppose nobody has told you," said Miss Shott, "that Edward Darley
has ploughed up that little pasture of his and planted it with young
apple trees. Now, it does seem to me that for a man like Edward Darley,
who comes of a consumptive family, and who has been coughin' regularly,
to my certain knowledge, for more than a year, to go and plant apple
trees, which he can't expect to live to see bear fruit, is nothing more
or less than a wicked waste of money, time, and labor. I suppose if I
was to go and tell hi