anyway why you object to
going. Your son can't afford to keep you both here, and hire somebody to
look after you into the bargain. Think of the advantages you have there,
theaters and museums and the like."

Mrs. Prentiss spoke sharply. "I've never been in a theater in my life and
I hope I'll go to my grave without being; and as for museums and things,
look at me! I'm so big I can hardly get into the cars, and my city
grandchildren are ashamed to go out with me and have all the folks looking
at the fat old woman from the country."

The doctor laughed involuntarily at this picture as he turned away.

"Do you think you are so big it takes the whole Necronsett valley to hold
you?" he called lightly over his shoulder.

Mrs. Prentiss looked after him with burning eyes What did _he_ know about
the continuity of human life He had told her himself that he had never
lived more than four years in one place. What did he know of ordering your
life, not only for yourself, but for your parents and grandparents? She
felt often as she looked upon the unchanging line of the mountains
guarding the valley, as in her great-grandfather's time, that she saw with
the eyes of her ancestors as well as her own. The room in which she stood
had been her grandmother's bedroom, and her father had been born there, as
she had been herself, and as her children had been. In her childhood she
had looked up to the top of the tall chest of drawers as to a mountain
peak, and her children had, after her. Every inequality in the floor was
as familiar to her feet as to those of her great-grandmother. The big
chest, where she had always kept her children's clothes, had guarded hers
and her mother's, and as often as she had knelt by it, she had so vivid a
recollection of seeing her mother and her grandmother in the same
attitude, that she seemed to lose for a moment the small and confining
sense of individual personality, and to become merged in a noble
procession of mothers of the race.

She had been an undisciplined girl, called a tomboy in those days, whose
farmer forbears had given to her a pagan passion for the soil and the open
sky. Although brought up with a rigid training in theology, religion had
never meant more to her than a certainty of hell as a punishment for
misdeeds which neither she nor any of the valley people were likely to
commit--murder, suicide, false swearing, and the like. Of definite
religious feeling, she had none, although the disc