maller things than bonfires. It was
the neighbourhood of Canaan's biggest and best. The doors that had
opened had shown glimpses of the finest three-ply carpets in all Tigmore
County, and though the women who had come out on the porches had
grammatical peculiarities of their own, they were distinctly
unapologetic and assured. You could easily imagine them laughing, with a
consciousness of advantage, at the other grades of grammar and carpets
in Canaan.

"Smells real good, don't it?" called one who was comfortable and portly,
and who had her apron wrapped about her hands, "always makes me feel
that spring's came when the rakin' and burnin' begin."

"Mrs. Pringle told me that they had some big fires aout toward the Ridge
las' night. Burned the rakin' aout to Madeira Place. I missed that.
D'you see it? I mighta seen it just as well's not from my back porch,
tew!" shrilled another woman, in whose words a well-defined jealousy was
patent, the jealousy of the person whose life is too small for her to
afford to miss any of it.

"Yes, you oughta saw it," chimed in another. "Cert'n'y was no
little-small flame. I could see Sally movin' araoun' in the flare. Had
that tramp-boy taggin' abaout with her. I declare, if he di'n' look like
a gipsy!"

The neighbourly throng was at this moment augmented by the appearance of
two ladies who fluttered out on the porch of a rose-trellised cottage,
like small, proud pouter pigeons. They were the Misses Marion,
twin-sisters, quite inseparable, and, because their minds had run in
exactly the same groove for all of their lives and because they were of
about equal mental readiness, apt to get the same impression at exactly
the same time, and apt to attempt expression in exactly the same breath.

Occasionally this was trying, both to the Misses Marion and to their
hearers, and it was particularly trying when the two now called
simultaneously from the rose-embowered porch to the women in the
neighbouring yards:

"Have you heard----"

"Have you heard----"

Miss Shelley Marion turned to Miss Blair Marion with delicate courtesy:
"Continue, sister," she said, just as Miss Blair said, "Sister,
continue."

"Have we heard what, for goodness' sake?" snapped one of the would-be
hearers, breaking in rawly upon the soft waves of the hand and the
imploring taps with which each of the two gentlewomen was endeavouring
to make way for the other.

"I continued last time, sister."

"I think not, Blai