oney-dew in the bottom, to please us perfectly. The hummers and I
understand that. You wouldn't believe how much company we are for one
another, or how much I learn from them. Even my silly mannikins give
work to my fingers and keep my thoughts steady."

Cousin Molly Belle put her arms around the wee old lady and hugged her
hard--the honeysuckles and catalpas falling to the floor.

"All this is the loveliest thing I ever heard!" laughing to keep from
crying. "I hope you will live to be a hundred years old, and give the
lie to or-nith-ol-o-gists every day you live. And Molly and I will come
to see you, often and often, whenever she is at our house. You dear,
brave, sensible, lion-hearted, _royal_ Queen Mab!"

She kept her word. It was one of her many ways to do more than she had
promised. I never paid a visit to my dearest cousins, the Frank Mortons,
without riding, or driving, up through the woods, and across the creek,
and up the two long, and the one short, hill, and along the grass-grown
lane to the gray cottage that always reminded me of a "hummer's" nest
masked with moss. I spent a good deal of that summer with Cousin Molly
Belle, and one week in the very middle of December.

The weather was very mild for midwinter, and the great south room felt
too warm to me. So warm that I began to feel sleepy and a little dizzy,
and Madam Leigh noticed the yawn I could not quite swallow.

"Put on your hood and cloak, little lady," she said, "and run into the
garden to see if you cannot find some roses for your cousin. Betty tells
me there has been so little frost this season that the rose-bushes are
still all in leaf."

I scampered off willingly, and did not show myself in the house again
until the sun almost touched the tree-tops. I gathered chrysanthemums
and nasturtiums and late heartsease, and at least a dozen roses and
buds, and, wandering farther and farther down the quiet paths, I saw
what I had never noticed before--that there was a small graveyard at the
back of the garden, of which it formed a part. An arbor, thickly
curtained with a Florida honeysuckle that kept its leaves all winter,
was at one side of the burial-place; a walk, edged with box, stretched
from it straight up to the house-yard. Now that the trees were bare, I
saw that old Madam Leigh could have a full view, through the windows in
the south gable, of the arbor, and the two white headstones before it:--

JOHN AND RUTH LEIGH.

TWIN