rs) beside
the cage, and, stretching out her feet in their large cloth shoes with
elastic sides, counted the stitches in an afghan she was knitting in
narrow blue and orange strips. In front of her, the street trailed
between cool, dim houses which were filled with quiet, and from the hall
at her back there came a whispering sound as the breeze moved like a
ghostly footstep through an alcove window. With that strange power of
reflecting the variable moods of humanity which one sometimes finds in
inanimate objects, the face of the old house had borrowed from the face
of its mistress the look of cheerful fortitude with which her generation
had survived the agony of defeat and the humiliation of reconstruction.
After nineteen years, the Academy still bore the scars of war on its
battered front. Once it had watched the spectre of famine stalk over the
grass-grown pavement, and had heard the rattle of musketry and the roar
of cannon borne on the southern breeze that now wafted the sounds of the
saw and the hammer from an adjacent street. Once it had seen the flight
of refugees, the overflow of the wounded from hospitals and churches,
the panic of liberated slaves, the steady conquering march of the army
of invasion. And though it would never have occurred to Miss Priscilla
that either she or her house had borne any relation to history (which
she regarded strictly as a branch of study and visualized as a list of
dates or as a king wearing his crown), she had, in fact, played a modest
yet effective part in the rapidly changing civilization of her age. But
events were powerless against the genial heroism in which she was
armoured, and it was characteristic of her, as well as of her race,
that, while she sat now in the midst of encircling battlefields, with
her eyes on the walk over which she had seen the blood of the wounded
drip when they were lifted into her door, she should be brooding not
over the tremendous tragedies through which she had passed, but over the
lesson in physical geography she must teach in the morning. Her lips
moved gently, and a listener, had there been one, might have heard her
murmur: "The four great alluvial plains of Asia--those of China and of
the Amoo Daria in temperate regions; of the Euphrates and Tigris in the
warm temperate; of the Indus and Ganges under the Tropic--with the Nile
valley in Africa, were the theatres of the most ancient civilizations
known to history or tradition----"

As she ende