e two. "Mamma saw her the other day, and thought that she seemed
more like herself; but she looked very old, too. She told mamma to
bring her dolls, and she would give her some bits of silk to make them
gowns. Poor mamma! and she had just been wondering how she could
manage to get us ready for summer, this year,--Celestine and me," and
the speaker smiled wistfully.

"It is a mercy that the dear old lady did forget all that happened;"
and the friends brushed some last bits of leaves from their skirts,
and rose and walked away together through the churchyard.

The ancient church waited through another Easter Even, with its
flowers and long memory of prayer and praise. The great earthquake had
touched it lightly, time had colored it softly, and the earthly bodies
of its children were gathered near its walls in peaceful sleep.

From one of the high houses which stood fronting the sea, with their
airy balconies and colonnades, had come a small, slender figure, like
some shy, dark thing of twilight out into the bright sunshine. The
street was empty, for the most part; before one or two of the cheap
German shops a group of men watched the little old lady step proudly
by. She was a very stately gentlewoman, for one so small and thin; she
was feeble, too, and bending somewhat with the weight of years, but
there was true elegance and dignity in the way she moved, and those
who saw her--persons who shuffled when they walked, and boasted loudly
of the fallen pride of the South--were struck with sudden deference
and admiration. Behind the lady walked a gray-headed negro, a man who
was troubled in spirit, who sometimes gained a step or two, and
offered an anxious but quite unheeded remonstrance. He was a poor,
tottering old fellow; he wore a threadbare evening coat that might
have belonged to his late master thirty years before.

The pair went slowly along the bay street to the end of a row of new
shops, and the lady turned decidedly toward the water, and approached
the ferry-steps. Her servitor groaned aloud, but waited in respectful
helplessness. There was a group of negro children on the steps,
employed in the dangerous business of crab-fishing; at the foot, in
his flat-bottomed boat, sat a wondering negro lad, who looked up in
apprehension at his passengers. The lady seemed like a ghost. Old
Peter,--with whose scorn of modern beings and their ways he was
partially familiar,--old Peter was making frantic signs to him to put
ou