lting our
ghosts to gray air?"

With a look of strong dislike, the woman gave Hulda the shillings,
saying:

"If you ever show one of 'em to me, gal, I'll make you swaller it."

Hulda took the silver pieces and looked at them a moment with girlish
delight:

"Oh, grandma, how kind you are! Why do you speak so mad at me when you
give me these pretty things? They seem almost warm in my bosom as I put
them there, like things with life. Let me kiss you for them!"

She rose from the chair and approached the mistress of the house, who
sat in a strange terror, not forbidding the embrace, yet almost
shuddering as Hulda stooped and pressed her pure young lips to the
blanched and dissipated face of Patty Cannon.

The Captain looked at the kiss with his peculiar strong, cold look, and
smiled at Hulda graciously and said:

"There, ladies, repose in each other's confidence! A few shillings for
such a kiss is shameful pay, Aunt Patty. Do you remember as well as I
do, Madame Cannon, that once you missed some money, and thought your
mother had stolen it, and hunted everywhere for it, and it never came to
light?"

"Yes," cried Patty Cannon, "I do," and swore a man's oath.

"Has the Senor been in that direction, do you think? I think he has, for
Melson and Milman are up from Twiford's with the news that Zeke's last
hide has burst her chain and fled, and all the lower Nanticoke gives no
trace of her, and Zeke has passed the heavenly gates."

The Captain drew the back of his silver clasp-knife across his throat,
smilingly, and placed on the table a sailor's sheath-knife.

"Zeke only was untied; it was a too generous omission," he said. "The
Philadelphia woman the Senor says he set free, and that she has gone to
start an alarm against us. The Senor is a cool man: he told me that, and
laughed and roared, and says he will live to see us all in a
picture-frame. _Ayme, ayme_, Patty!"

With her face growing longer and longer, the woman heard these scarcely
intelligible sentences--wholly unintelligible to the younger people--and
to Levin it seemed that she grew suddenly old and yet older, till her
cheeks, but lately blooming, seemed dead and wrinkled, and, from
maintaining the appearance of hardly fifty, and fair at that, she now
looked to be more than sixty years of age, and sad and helpless.

"Van Dorn, I'm dying," she muttered, as her eyes glazed, and she settled
down in her chair like a lump of dough.

"_Ha! O hala hala_! hand