l more and more
under the influence of the habit of retrospection.

The only brightness of colour which life could ever have for her lay
behind in the girlhood which had ended but yesterday, and was yet so
completely ended. She found her only happiness in the recollections of
that period which she retained. These were the only goods she prized, and
it was the grief of her life that, while she had strong boxes for her
money, and locks and keys for her silver and her linen, there was no
device whereby she could protect her store of memories from the slow
wasting of forgetfulness.

She lived with a servant quite alone in the old Ludington homestead,
which it was her absorbing care to keep in precisely the same condition,
even to the arrangement of the furniture, in which it had always been.

If she could have insured the same permanence in the village of Hilton,
outside the homestead enclosure, she would have been spared the cause of
her keenest unhappiness. For the hand of change was making havoc with the
village: the railroad had come, shops had been built, and stores and new
houses were going up on every side, and the beautiful hamlet, with its
score or two of old-fashioned dwellings, which had been the scene of her
girlhood, was in a fair way to be transformed into a vile manufacturing
village.

Miss Ludington, to whom every stick and stone of the place was dear,
could not walk abroad without missing some ancient landmark removed since
she had passed that way before, perhaps a tree felled, some meadow, that
had been a playground of her childhood, dug up for building-lots, or a
row of brick tenements going up on the site of a sacred grove.

Her neighbours generally had succumbed to the rage for improvement, as
they called it. There was a general remodelling and modernizing of
houses, and, where nothing more expensive could be afforded, the
paint-brush wrought its cheap metamorphosis. "You wouldn't know Hilton
was the same place," was the complacent verdict of her neighbours, to
which Miss Ludington sorrowfully assented.

It would be hard to describe her impotent wrath, her sense of outrage and
irreparable loss, as one by one these changes effaced some souvenir of
her early life. The past was once dead already; they were killing it a
second time. Her feelings at length became so intolerable that she kept
her house, pretty much ceasing to walk abroad.

At this period, when she was between thirty and thirty-five yea