er
in the day.

* * *

Meanwhile the boys had disposed of their bottles to the drug-store,
receiving in payment a bountiful supply of gum, licorice, and
drug-store candies, and a Union Jack for each one. There was quite
a run on bottles before an hour, for the Hogan twins cornered the
market by slipping around to the alley at the back of the store and
securing the bottles that stood in a box in the back shed. Then
they came around to the front and sold them again, flags being the
consideration every time, for the twins were loyal sons of the
Dominion.

The drug-store man had bought his own bottles twice before he found
out, but it is a proof of the twins' ability as financiers that they
did not come back after he found it out. Lots of silly little boys
would, but there is an advantage in being twins!

Down below the town, on the river-flat, the old timers were getting
together. Under a grove of tall elms a group of the older men were
recounting the stirring scenes of the boom days, when flour was ten
dollars a bag, and sugar twenty-five cents a pound; and the big flood
of '82, when the Souris, the peaceful little murmuring stream that
now glinted through the trees below them, ran full from bank to bank
and every house in Millford had a raft tied to its back door.

In the picnic grounds, which had been cleared out for this purpose
years before, the women, faded and worn, most of them, with many long
years on the prairie, but wonderfully brightened up by meeting old
friends, spread their table-covers on the long, rough tables, and
brought out the contents of their baskets.

Mrs. Watson introduced her sister-in-law to all the old friends, who
at once received her into the sisterhood, and in a few minutes Aunt
Kate was exchanging opinions on lemon pies with the best of them.

Then, speaking of pies, some one recalled Grandma Lowry's vinegar
pies-that triumph of housewifely art, whereby a pie is made without
eggs or milk or fruit, and still is a "pie!"

"Wasn't she a wonder? Did you ever see the beat of old Grandma
Lowry?" they asked each other, looking up the hillside where they had
laid her the year before, and hushing their voices reverently as if
they were afraid that they might disturb her slumbers.

"I brought some of the vinegar pies to-day," Mrs. Slater said. "I
thought it would be nice to remember her that way. She brought me
over two of them the first Christmas we were in the country. I never
will forg