moved, all right. The cost will not
be so great. Meanwhile we can be getting the old house into shape to
receive him."

She found Aunt Jane sitting before her fire, with a tray of tea and toast
beside her, and her bonnet already set jauntily a-top of her head, the
strings flowing.

"You found that flat in a mess, I'll be bound!" observed Aunt Jane.

Lydia admitted it. She also told her what the second-hand man had offered.

"Twenty dollars?" cried Aunt Jane. "Take it, quick, before he has a change
of heart!"

But when Lyddy told her of what the doctor at the hospital had said about
Mr. Bray, and how they really seemed forced into taking up with the offer
of Hillcrest, the old lady looked and spoke more seriously.

"You're just as welcome to the use of the old house, and all you can make
out of the farm-crop, as you can be. I stick to what I told you last
night. But I dunno whether you can really be comfortable there."

"We'll find out; we'll try it," returned Lyddy, bravely. "Nothing like
trying, Aunt Jane."

"Humph! there's a good many things better than trying, sometimes. You've
got to have sense in your trying. If it was me, I wouldn't go to Hillcrest
for any money you could name!

"But then," she added, "I'm old and you are young. I wish I could sell
the old place for a decent sum; but an abandoned farm on the top of a
mountain, with the railroad station six miles away, ain't the kind of
property that sells easy in the real estate market, lemme tell you!

"Besides, there ain't much of the two hundred acres that's tillable. Them
romantic-looking rocks that 'Phemie was exclaimin' over last night, are
jest a nuisance. Humph! the old doctor used to say there was money going
to waste up there in them rocks, though. I remember hearing him talk about
it once or twice; but jest what he meant I never knew."

"Mineral deposits?" asked Lyddy, hopefully.

"Not wuth anything. Time an' agin there's been college professors and
such, tappin' the rocks all over the farm for 'specimens.' But there ain't
nothing in the line of precious min'rals in that heap of rocks at the
back of Hillcrest Farm--believe me!

"Dr. Polly useter say, however, that there was curative waters there. He
used 'em some in his practise towards the last. But he died suddent, you
know, and nobody ever knew where he got the water--'nless 'twas Jud Spink.
And Jud had run away with a medicine show years before father died.

"Well!" sighed Aunt Jane.