s of the
old years were moving up and down the road. Everything is so beautiful
today! Doesn't the sky look as if it had been dyed blue and the fields
painted pink and green and yellow this very minute?"

"It's a perfectly elegant day!" responded Emma Jane with a sigh. "If
only my mind was at rest! That's the difference between being young and
grown-up. We never used to think and worry."

"Indeed we didn't! Look, Emmy, there's the very spot where Uncle Jerry
Cobb stopped the stage and I stepped out with my pink parasol and my
bouquet of purple lilacs, and you were watching me from your bedroom
window and wondering what I had in mother's little hair trunk strapped
on behind. Poor Aunt Miranda didn't love me at first sight, and oh, how
cross she was the first two years! But now every hard thought I ever had
comes back to me and cuts like a knife!"

"She was dreadful hard to get along with, and I used to hate her like
poison," confessed Emma Jane; "but I am sorry now. She was kinder toward
the last, anyway, and then, you see children know so little! We never
suspected she was sick or that she was worrying over that lost interest
money."

"That's the trouble. People seem hard and unreasonable and unjust,
and we can't help being hurt at the time, but if they die we forget
everything but our own angry speeches; somehow we never remember theirs.
And oh, Emma Jane, there's another such a sweet little picture out there
in the road. The next day after I came to Riverboro, do you remember, I
stole out of the brick house crying, and leaned against the front gate.
You pushed your little fat pink-and-white face through the pickets and
said: Don't cry! I'll kiss you if you will me!'"

Lumps rose suddenly in Emma Jane's throat, and she put her arm around
Rebecca's waist as they sat together side by side.

"Oh, I do remember," she said in a choking voice. "And I can see the two
of us driving over to North Riverboro and selling soap to Mr. Adam
Ladd; and lighting up the premium banquet lamp at the Simpson party; and
laying the daisies round Jacky Winslow's mother when she was dead in
the cabin; and trundling Jacky up and down the street in our old baby
carriage!"

"And I remember you," continued Rebecca, "being chased down the hill
by Jacob Moody, when we were being Daughters of Zion and you had been
chosen to convert him!"

"And I remember you, getting the flag back from Mr. Simpson; and how you
looked when you spoke your vers