ry reception of her niece's enthusiastic
presentation of ideas had a somewhat quenching effect upon the real
flow of conversation.

"Did you leave Timothy down at the Branch?" queried Miss Asenath, after
awhile.

"Oh, I reckon he went on home," Arethusa answered carelessly.

She could be thus casual in her answers to Miss Asenath, for with her
no subject had pursuit unto a bitter end.

Miss Letitia finished the hem of the blue dress and laid the garment
carefully over the back of a chair. Then she reached over and took
Arethusa's pile of stockings away from her.

"Suppose, dearie," she suggested, "you practise a bit now. You don't
play that piece yet as well as you ought, and your father used to be a
great lover of music. He will want to hear you play."

Arethusa rose obediently and went to the piano; twirled the squeaking
stool to a lower height, and settled herself, elbows properly rigid and
head upright. Miss Letitia was her music teacher.

In fact, all of her education, domestic and academic and purely
ornamental, as Miss Eliza termed the music, had been gained at home.
Instruction in the "principal branches," again Miss Eliza's name, had
been received mostly from Miss Asenath. Geography she had taught her
niece with the aid of the same faded globe that had fixed the shape of
the world and the location of its hemispheres and continents and
principal countries in her own mind. If the boundaries of any of those
countries had changed since the globe was made; if new land had been
discovered; if any hitherto obscure cities had sprung into size and
prominence during the sixty years or more that the globe had stood in
the corner of the square hall: it had made no sort of difference in the
geography lessons. Arethusa had learned history, from ancient history
books with almost obliterated names on the fly-leaves. But it had been
rather a biased version of the period connected with the Civil War
which she had learned, for Miss Eliza was very bitter about those years
of her country's existence. Her only brother, and her twin, had been
killed fighting for the Confederacy. Miss Eliza seemed to be unable to
believe that he had been killed in battle, however, for she always
spoke of him as "murdered" by the Yankees. So Arethusa's ideas of
events connected with this time was hardly very favorably inclined
towards the Northern side. Miss Asenath was very shaky in arithmetic;
therefore, her pupil had not got into higher math