n casters to put under beds and chairs, rollers for
cotton mills. As soon as my husband returns, I'll ask him to take you
through it. That and the old church are the only historic monuments in
town."

She stopped and asked him meditatively, "What else do you suppose I need
to forestall old Mrs. Powers on? My old Cousin Hetty perhaps. She has a
last name, Allen--yes, some connection with Ethan Allen. I am, myself.
But everybody has always called her Miss Hetty till few people remember
that she has another name. She was born there in the old house below
'the Burning,' and she has lived there for eighty years, and that is all
her saga. You can't see her house from here, but it is part of
Crittenden's all the same, although it is a mile away by the main road
as you go towards the Dug-Way. But you can reach it in six or seven
minutes from here by a back lane, through the Eagle Rock woods."

"What nice names!" Mr. Welles luxuriated in them. "The Eagle Rock woods.
The Dug-Way. The Burning. Deer Hollow."

"I bet you don't know what they mean," Vincent challenged him. Vincent
was always throwing challenges, at everything. But by this time he had
learned how to dodge them. "No, I don't know, and I don't care if I
don't," he answered happily.

It pleased him that Mrs. Crittenden found this amusing, so that she
looked at him laughing. How her eyes glistened when she laughed. It made
you laugh back. He risked another small attempt at facetiousness. "Go on
with the census of Crittenden's," he told her. "I want to know all about
my future fellow-citizens. You haven't even finished up this house,
anybody but your husband."

"There is myself. You see me. There is nothing more to that. And there
are the three children, Paul, Elly, and Mark, . . ." She paused here
rather abruptly, and the whimsical accent of good-humored mockery
disappeared. For an instant her face changed into something quite
different from what they had seen. Mr. Welles could not at all make out
the expression which very passingly had flickered across her eyes with a
smoke-like vagueness and rapidity. He had the queerest fancy that she
looked somehow scared,--but of course that was preposterous.

"Your call," she told them both, "happens to fall on a day which marks a
turning-point in our family life. This is the very first day in ten
years, since Paul's birth, that I have not had at least one of the
children beside me. Today is the opening of spring term in our c