she acknowledged to herself, in a
flash, how coarse-minded he must be to mingle the present with his
sacred past. But she started and involuntarily looked up. The spinster
cousin was giggling like a girl.

"Now you've got back," she was saying to Eben. "Now I know it's you,
sure enough. He took that up when he wa'n't hardly out o' pinafores,"
she said to Lydia.

"What?" Lydia managed, through her anger at him.

"Comparin' everything with his first wife. Where'd he get it, mother?"

"Why," said aunt Phebe, "there was that old Simeon Spence that used to
come round clock-mendin'. He was forever tellin' what his first wife
used to do, an' Eben he ketched it up, an' then, when we laughed at him,
he done it the more. Land o' love, Lyddy, you chokin'?"

Lydia was sobbing and laughing together, and Eben turned in a panic from
his talk with uncle Sim, to pound her back.

"No, no," she kept saying. "I'm all right. No! no!"

"Suthin' went the wrong way," commiserated aunt Phebe, when they were
all in their places again and Lydia had wiped her eyes.

"Yes," said Lydia joyously, as if choking were a very happy matter. "It
went the wrong way. Eben, you pass aunt Phebe my cup."

And while the coffee was coming she sought out Eben's hand again and
turned to gaze at him with such tell-tale eyes that the spinster cousin,
blushing a little, looked at once away, and wondered how it would seem
to be so foolish and so fond.

A FLOWER OF APRIL

Ellen Withington and her mother lived in a garden. There was a house
behind it, with great white pillars like a temple, but it played a
secondary part to that sweet inclosure--all bees and blossoms. Ellen and
her mother duly slept in the house, and through the barren months it did
very well for shelter while they talked of slips and bulbs and thirsted
over the seed-catalogue come by mail. But from the true birth of the
year to the next frost they were steadily out-of-doors, weeding,
tending, transplanting, with an untiring passion. All the blossoms New
England counts her dearest grew from that ancient mould, enriched with
every spring. Ladies'-delights forgathered underneath the hedge, and
lilies-of-the-valley were rank with chill sweetness in their time. The
flowering currant breathed like fruitage from the East, and there were
never such peonies, such poppies, and such dahlias in all the town.

Ellen herself had an apple-bloom face, and violet eyes down-dropped;
some one said th