winter's coats and furs.

And how about hats? Was there hope in store for her there? she wondered,
as she walked home from the Perkins house, full of admiration for Emma
Jane's winter outfit, and loyally trying to keep that admiration free
from wicked envy. Her red-winged black hat was her second best, and
although it was shabby she still liked it, but it would never do for
church, even in Aunt Miranda's strange and never-to-be-comprehended
views of suitable raiment.

There was a brown felt turban in existence, if one could call it
existence when it had been rained on, snowed on, and hailed on for two
seasons; but the trimmings had at any rate perished quite off the face
of the earth, that was one comfort!

Emma Jane had said, rather indiscreetly, that at the village milliner's
at Milliken's Mills there was a perfectly elegant pink breast to be had,
a breast that began in a perfectly elegant solferino and terminated in a
perfectly elegant magenta; two colors much in vogue at that time. If
the old brown hat was to be her portion yet another winter, would Aunt
Miranda conceal its deficiencies from a carping world beneath the shaded
solferino breast? WOULD she, that was the question?

Filled with these perplexing thoughts, Rebecca entered the brick house,
hung up her hood in the entry, and went into the dining-room.

Miss Jane was not there, but Aunt Miranda sat by the window with her lap
full of sewing things, and a chair piled with pasteboard boxes by her
side. In one hand was the ancient, battered, brown felt turban, and in
the other were the orange and black porcupine quills from Rebecca's last
summer's hat; from the hat of the summer before that, and the summer
before that, and so on back to prehistoric ages of which her childish
memory kept no specific record, though she was sure that Temperance and
Riverboro society did. Truly a sight to chill the blood of any eager
young dreamer who had been looking at gayer plumage!

Miss Sawyer glanced up for a second with a satisfied expression and then
bent her eyes again upon her work.

"If I was going to buy a hat trimming," she said, "I couldn't select
anything better or more economical than these quills! Your mother had
them when she was married, and you wore them the day you come to the
brick house from the farm; and I said to myself then that they looked
kind of outlandish, but I've grown to like em now I've got used to em.
You've been here for goin' on two years a