ed go near
her. I don't know as she was really needin' anythin' very much, for
there was enough to eat in her house and it was warm weather, and she
made out to cook a little flour gruel every day, I know, but I guess
she had a hard time, she that had been so petted and done for all her
life.

"When I got so I could go out, I went over there one morning. Mrs.
Babbit had just come in to say she hadn't seen any smoke and she didn't
know but it was somebody's duty to go in, but she couldn't help
thinkin' of her children, and I got right up, though I hadn't been out
of the house for two weeks, and I went in there, and Luella she was
layin' on the bed, and she was dyin'.

"She lasted all that day and into the night. But I sat there after the
new doctor had gone away. Nobody else dared to go there. It was about
midnight that I left her for a minute to run home and get some medicine
I had been takin', for I begun to feel rather bad.

"It was a full moon that night, and just as I started out of my door to
cross the street back to Luella's, I stopped short, for I saw
something."

Lydia Anderson at this juncture always said with a certain defiance
that she did not expect to be believed, and then proceeded in a hushed
voice:

"I saw what I saw, and I know I saw it, and I will swear on my death
bed that I saw it. I saw Luella Miller and Erastus Miller, and Lily,
and Aunt Abby, and Maria, and the Doctor, and Sarah, all goin' out of
her door, and all but Luella shone white in the moonlight, and they
were all helpin' her along till she seemed to fairly fly in the midst
of them. Then it all disappeared. I stood a minute with my heart
poundin', then I went over there. I thought of goin' for Mrs. Babbit,
but I thought she'd be afraid. So I went alone, though I knew what had
happened. Luella was layin' real peaceful, dead on her bed."

This was the story that the old woman, Lydia Anderson, told, but the
sequel was told by the people who survived her, and this is the tale
which has become folklore in the village.

Lydia Anderson died when she was eighty-seven. She had continued
wonderfully hale and hearty for one of her years until about two weeks
before her death.

One bright moonlight evening she was sitting beside a window in her
parlour when she made a sudden exclamation, and was out of the house
and across the street before the neighbour who was taking care of her
could stop her. She followed as fast as possibl