st four. She did
not visibly shrink from the pursuit of the sympathy which expressed
itself in curiosity as to the sickness they had died of; the ladies left
her with the belief that they had met a character, and she remained with
the conviction, briefly imparted to her husband, that they were tonguey.

The summer folks came more and more, every year, with little variance in
the impression on either side. When they told her that her maple sugar
would sell better if the cake had an image of Lion's Head stamped on it,
she answered that she got enough of Lion's Head without wanting to see it
on all the sugar she made. But the next year the cakes bore a rude effigy
of Lion's Head, and she said that one of her boys had cut the stamp out
with his knife; she now charged five cents a cake for the sugar, but her
manner remained the same. It did not change when the excursionists drove
away, and the deep silence native to the place fell after their chatter.
When a cock crew, or a cow lowed, or a horse neighed, or one of the boys
shouted to the cattle, an echo retorted from the granite base of Lion's
Head, and then she had all the noise she wanted, or, at any rate, all the
noise there was most of the time. Now and then a wagon passed on the
stony road by the brook in the valley, and sent up its clatter to the
farm-house on its high shelf, but there was scarcely another break from
the silence except when the coaching-parties came.

The continuous clash and rush of the brook was like a part of the
silence, as the red of the farm-house and the barn was like a part of the
green of the fields and woods all round them: the black-green of pines
and spruces, the yellow-green of maples and birches, dense to the tops of
the dreary hills, and breaking like a bated sea around the Lion's Head.
The farmer stooped at his work, with a thin, inward-curving chest, but
his wife stood straight at hers; and she had a massive beauty of figure
and a heavily moulded regularity of feature that impressed such as had
eyes to see her grandeur among the summer folks. She was forty when they
began to come, and an ashen gray was creeping over the reddish heaps of
her hair, like the pallor that overlies the crimson of the autumnal oak.
She showed her age earlier than most fair people, but since her marriage
at eighteen she had lived long in the deaths of the children she had
lost. They were born with the taint of their father's family, and they
withered from thei