yhood, and had a reverential affection for her. During the years
when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking the three
meals--the first of which was ready at six o'clock in the morning--and
putting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at her
ironing-board, with me at the kitchen table beside her, hearing me recite
Latin declensions and conjugations, gently shaking me when my drowsy head
sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at her ironing
or mending, that I read my first Shakspere, and her old text-book on
mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands. She taught me
my scales and exercises on the little parlour organ which her husband had
bought her after fifteen years during which she had not so much as seen a
musical instrument. She would sit beside me by the hour, darning and
counting, while I struggled with the "Joyous Farmer." She seldom talked
to me about music, and I understood why. Once when I had been doggedly
beating out some easy passages from an old score of _Euryanthe_ I had
found among her music books, she came up to me and, putting her hands
over my eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, saying
tremulously, "Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you."

When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival in Boston, she was
still in a semi-somnambulant state. She seemed not to realize that she
was in the city where she had spent her youth, the place longed for
hungrily half a lifetime. She had been so wretchedly train-sick
throughout the journey that she had no recollection of anything but her
discomfort, and, to all intents and purposes, there were but a few hours
of nightmare between the farm in Red Willow County and my study on
Newbury Street. I had planned a little pleasure for her that afternoon,
to repay her for some of the glorious moments she had given me when we
used to milk together in the straw-thatched cowshed and she, because I
was more than usually tired, or because her husband had spoken sharply to
me, would tell me of the splendid performance of the _Huguenots_ she
had seen in Paris, in her youth.

At two o'clock the Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner program, and I
intended to take my aunt; though, as I conversed with her, I grew
doubtful about her enjoyment of it. I suggested our visiting the
Conservatory and the Common before lunch, but she seemed altogether too
timid to wish to venture