ton.

"But I am the same person," responded Mrs. Slater.

Miss Ludington regarded her with a smile.

"You have kept your looks remarkably, my dear," she said. "You did not
lose them all at once, as I did; but isn't it a little audacious to try
to pass yourself off as a school-girl of seventeen?"

Mrs. Slater laughed. "But I once was she, if I am not now," she said.
"You won't deny that."

"I certainly shall deny it, with your permission," replied Ludington. "I
remember her very well, and she was no more an old woman like you than
you are a young girl like her."

Mrs. Slater laughed again. "How sharp you are getting, my dear!" she
said. "Since you are so close after me, I shall have to admit that I have
changed slightly in appearance in the forty odd years since we went to
school at Hilton, and I'll admit that my heart is even less like a girl's
than my face; but, though I have changed so much, I am still the same
person, I suppose."

"Which do you mean?" inquired Miss Ludington. "You say in one breath that
you are a changed person, and that you are the same person. If you are a
changed person you can't be the same, and if you are the same you can't
have changed."

"I should really like to know what you are driving at," said Mrs. Slater,
calmly. "It seems to me that we are disputing about words."

"Oh, no, not about words! It is a great deal more than a question of
words," exclaimed Miss Ludington. "You say that we old women and the
girls who sat here forty years and more ago are the same persons,
notwithstanding we are so completely transformed without and within. I
say we are not the same, and thank God, for their sweet sakes, that we
are not. Surely that is not a mere dispute about words."

"But, if we are not those girls, then what has become of them?" asked
Mrs. Slater.

"You might better ask what had become of them if you had to seek them in
us; but I will tell you what has become of them, Sarah. It is what will
become of us when we, in our turn, vanish from earth, and the places that
know us now shall know us no more. They are immortal with God, and we
shall one day meet them over there."

"What a very odd idea!" exclaimed Mrs. Slater, regarding her friend with
astonishment.

Miss Ludington flushed slightly as she replied, "I don't think it half so
odd, and not nearly so repulsive, as your notion, that we old women are
the mummies of the girls who came before us. It is easier, as well as far
sweet