, "did you see the baby?"

"No," I whispered.

"I think it's the finest baby I ever saw in my life."

When I was a boy, and my great-aunt, who lived for many years in a
little room with dormer windows at the top of my father's house, used
to tell me stories (the best I ever heard), I was never content with the
endings of them. "What happened next?" I remember asking a hundred
times; and if I did not ask the question aloud it arose at least in my
own mind.

If I were writing fiction I might go on almost indefinitely with the
story of Anna; but in real life stories have a curious way of coming to
quick fruition, and withering away after having cast the seeds of their
immortality.

"Did you see the baby?" Harriet had asked. She said no word about Anna:
a BABY had come into the world. Already the present was beginning to
draw the charitable curtains of its forgetfulness across this simple
drama; already Harriet and Anna and all the rest of us were beginning to
look to the "finest baby we ever saw in all our lives."

I might, indeed, go into the character of Anna and the whys and
wherefores of her story; but there is curiously little that is strange
or unusual about it. It was just Life. A few days with us worked
miraculous changes in the girl; like some stray kitten brought in
crying from the cold, she curled herself up comfortably there in our
home, purring her contentment. She was not in the least a tragic figure:
though down deep under the curves and dimples of youth there was
something finally resistant, or obstinate, or defiant--which kept its
counsel regarding the past.

It is curious how acquaintanceship mitigates our judgments. We classify
strangers into whose careers the newspapers or our friends give us
glimpses as "bad" or "good"; we separate humanity into inevitable
goathood and sheephood. But upon closer acquaintance a man comes to be
not bad, but Ebenezer Smith or J. Henry Jones; and a woman is not good,
but Nellie Morgan or Mrs. Arthur Cadwalader. Take it in our own cases.
Some people, knowing just a little about us, might call us pretty good
people; but we know that down in our hearts lurk the possibilities (if
not the actual accomplishment) of all sorts of things not at all good.
We are exceedingly charitable persons--toward ourselves. And thus we let
other people live!

The other day, at Harriet's suggestion, I drove to town by the upper
road, passing the Williams place. The old lady has a passio