lls anybody quickest,
Doctor?" Then, in a whisper, "I ran away again the other day, you know."

"Where did you go?" The Doctor spoke in a low, serious tone.

"Oh, to the old place. Here, I brought this for you."

The Doctor started as she handed him a flower of the Atragene Americana,
for he knew that there was only one spot where it grew, and that not
one where any rash foot, least of all a thin-shod woman's foot, should
venture.

"How long were you gone?" said the Doctor.

"Only one night. You should have heard the horns blowing and the guns
firing. Dudley was frightened out of his wits. Old Sophy told him she'd
had a dream, and that I should be found in Dead-Man's Hollow, with a
great rock lying on me. They hunted all over it, but they did n't find
me,--I was farther up."

Doctor Kittredge looked cloudy and worried while she was speaking, but
forced a pleasant professional smile, as he said cheerily, and as if
wishing to change the subject,

"Have a good dance this evening, Elsie. The fiddlers are tuning up.
Where 's the young master? has he come yet? or is he going to be late,
with the other great folks?"

The girl turned away without answering, and looked toward the door.

The "great folks," meaning the mansion-house gentry, were just beginning
to come; Dudley Venner and his daughter had been the first of them.
Judge Thornton, white-headed, fresh-faced, as good at sixty as he was
at forty, with a youngish second wife, and one noble daughter, Arabella,
who, they said, knew as much law as her father, a stately, Portia like
girl, fit for a premier's wife, not like to find her match even in the
great cities she sometimes visited; the Trecothicks, the family of a
merchant, (in the larger sense,) who, having made himself rich enough by
the time he had reached middle life, threw down his ledger as Sylla did
his dagger, and retired to make a little paradise around him in one
of the stateliest residences of the town, a family inheritance; the
Vaughans, an old Rockland race, descended from its first settlers,
Toryish in tendency in Revolutionary times, and barely escaping
confiscation or worse; the Dunhams, a new family, dating its gentility
only as far back as the Honorable Washington Dunham, M. C., but turning
out a clever boy or two that went to college; and some showy girls with
white necks and fat arms who had picked up professional husbands: these
were the principal mansion-house people. All of them had made