state pensioner. At that period she
appears to have struck a trail to the Happy Hunting Grounds. I quote
from the local historiographer.

Whether they were developing a kitchen garden, or emulating Professor
Schliemann at Mycenae, the new-comers were evidently persons of refined
musical taste: the lady had a contralto voice of remarkable sweetness,
although of no great compass, and I used often to linger of a morning by
the high gate and listen to her executing an arietta, conjecturally at
some window upstairs, for the house was not visible from the turnpike.
The husband, somewhere about the grounds, would occasionally respond
with two or three bars. It was all quite an ideal, Arcadian business.
They seemed very happy together, these two persons, who asked no odds
whatever of the community in which they had settled themselves.

There was a queerness, a sort of mystery, about this couple which I
admit piqued my curiosity, though as a rule I have no morbid interest in
the affairs of my neighbors. They behaved like a pair of lovers who
had run off and got married clandestinely. I willingly acquitted them,
however, of having done anything unlawful; for, to change a word in the
lines of the poet,

"It is a joy to _think_ the best
We may of human kind."

Admitting the hypothesis of elopement, there was no mystery in their
neither sending nor receiving letters. But where did they get their
groceries? I do not mean the money to pay for them--that is an enigma
apart--but the groceries themselves. No express wagon, no butcher's
cart, no vehicle of any description, was ever observed to stop at their
domicile. Yet they did not order family stores at the sole establishment
in the village--an inexhaustible little bottle of a shop which, I
advertise it gratis, can turn out anything in the way of groceries,
from a handsaw to a pocket-handkerchief. I confess that I allowed this
unimportant detail of their _menage_ to occupy more of my speculation
than was creditable to me.

In several respects our neighbors reminded me of those inexplicable
persons we sometimes come across in great cities, though seldom or never
in suburban places, where the field may be supposed too restricted for
their operations--persons who have no perceptible means of subsistence,
and manage to live royally on nothing a year. They hold no government
bonds, they possess no real estate (our neighbors did own their house),
they toil not, neither do the