en to their ways disturbed their
peace of mind.

"An upland meadow where clover and mignonette will grow," she had said,
and such an one she found, and planted thick with fine white clover
and with mignonette. Then, while the carpenters raised her cabin at the
border of the meadow, near the street, she passed among the villagers,
mingling with them gently, winning their good-will, in spite of
themselves.

The cabin was of unbarked maple logs, with four rooms and a rustic
portico. Then all the villagers stared in very truth. They, living
in their trim and ugly little homes, accounted houses of logs as the
misfortune of their pioneer parents. A shed for wood, a barn for the
Jersey cow, a rustic fence, tall, with a high swinging gate, completed
the domain. In the front room of the cabin was a fireplace of rude
brick. In the bedrooms, cots as bare and hard as a nun's, and in the
kitchen the domestic necessaries; that was all. The poorest house-holder
in the town would not have confessed to such scant furnishing. Yet the
richest man might well have hesitated before he sent to France for hives
and hives of bees, as she did, setting them up along the southern border
of her meadow.

Later there came strong boxes, marked with many marks of foreign
transportation lines, and the neighbor-gossips, seeing them, imagined
wealth of curious furniture; but the man who carted them told his wife,
who told her friend, who told her friend, that every box to the last one
was placed in the dry cemented cellar, and left there in the dark.

"An' a mighty ridic'lous expense a cellar like that is, t' put under a
house of that char'cter," said the man to his wife--who repeated it to
her friend.

"But that ain't all," the carpenter's wife had said when she heard about
it all, "Hank says there is one little room, not fit for buttery nor
yet fur closit, with a window high up--well, you ken see yourself-an' a
strong door. Jus' in passin' th' other day, when he was there, hangin'
some shelves, he tried it, an' it was locked!"

"Well!" said the women who listened.

However, they were not unfriendly, these brisk gossips. Two of them,
plucking up tardy courage, did call one afternoon. Their hostess was out
among her bees, crooning to them, as it seemed, while they lighted all
about her, lit on the flower in her dark hair, buzzed vivaciously about
her snow-white linen gown, lighted on her long, dark hands. She came
in brightly when she saw her gue