rs old, a
distant relative left her a large fortune. She had been well-to-do
before, but now she was very rich. As her expenses had never exceeded a
few hundred dollars a year, which had procured her everything she needed,
it would be hard to imagine a person with less apparent use for a great
deal of money. And yet no young rake, in the heyday of youth and the riot
of hot blood, could have been more overjoyed at the falling to him of a
fortune than was this sad-faced old maid. She became smiling and
animated. She no longer kept at home, but walked abroad. Her step was
quick and strong; she looked on at the tree-choppers, the builders, and
the painters, at their nefarious work, no more in helpless grief and
indignation, but with an unmistakable expression of triumph.

Presently surveyors appeared in the village, taking exact and careful
measurements of the single broad and grassy street which formed the older
part of it. Miss Ludington was closeted with a builder, and engrossed
with estimates. The next year she left Hilton to the mercy of the
vandals, and never returned.

But it was to another Hilton that she went.

The fortune she had inherited had enabled her to carry out a design which
had been a day-dream with her ever since the transformation of the
village had begun. Among the pieces of property left her was a large farm
on Long Island several miles out of the city of Brooklyn. Here she had
rebuilt the Hilton of her girlhood, in facsimile, with every change
restored, every landmark replaced. In the midst of this silent village
she had built for her residence an exact duplicate of the Ludington
homestead, situated in respect to the rest of the village precisely as
the original was situated in the real Hilton.

The astonishment of the surveyors and builders at the character of the
work required of them was probably great, and their bills certainly were,
though Miss Ludington would not have grudged the money had they been ten
times greater. However, seeing that the part of the village duplicated
consisted of but one broad maple-planted street, with not over thirty
houses, mostly a story and a half, and that none of the buildings, except
the school-house, the little meeting-house, and the homestead, were
finished inside, the outlay was not greater than an elaborate plan of
landscape gardening would have involved.

The furniture and fittings of the Massachusetts homestead, to the least
detail, had been used to fit