sat down among them
as a new guest. I had been tranquilly greeted, and had slipped away into
a corner behind a table, whence I looked out with some curiosity on the
room and on the dwellers with whom my lot was to be cast for a long
while to come. I was a youth shy with the shyness of my age, but, having
had a share of rough, hardy life, ruddy of visage and full of that
intense desire to know things and people that springs up quickly in
those who have lived in country hamlets far from the stir and bustle of
city life.

The room I looked upon was strange, the people strange. On the floor was
India matting, red and white in little squares. A panel of painted white
wood-work ran around an octagonal chamber, into which stole silently the
evening twilight through open windows and across a long brick-walled
garden-space full of roses and Virginia creepers and odorless
wisterias. Between the windows sat a silent, somewhat stately female,
dressed in gray silk, with a plain frilled cap about the face, and with
long and rather slim arms tightly clad in silk. Her fingers played at
hide-and-seek among some marvelous lace stitches--evidently a woman
whose age had fallen heir to the deft ways of her youth. Over her
against the wall hung a portrait of a girl of twenty, somewhat sober in
dress, with what we should call a Martha Washington cap. It was a
pleasant face, unstirred by any touch of fate, with calm blue eyes
awaiting the future.

The hostess saw, I fancied, my set gaze, and rising came toward me as if
minded to put at ease the new-comer. "Thee does not know our friends?"
she said. "Let me make thee known to them."

I rose quickly and said, "I shall be most glad."

We went over toward the dame between the windows. "Mother," she said,
raising her voice, "this is our new friend, Henry Shelburne, from New
England."

As she spoke I saw the old lady stir and move, and after a moment she
said, "Has he a four-leaved clover?"

"Always that is what she says. Thee will get used to it in time."

"We all do," said a voice at my elbow; and turning I saw a man of about
thirty years, dressed in the plainest-cut Quaker clothes, but with a
contradiction to every tenet of Fox written on his face, where a brow of
gravity for ever read the riot act to eyes that twinkled with
ill-repressed mirth. When I came to know him well, and saw the
preternatural calm of his too quiet lips, I used to imagine that unseen
little demons of ready laught