stiff
furniture and stiff family portraits. The attic was a big, natural
room filled with mellow light, a vague hush and memories--memories of
lost days, lost dreams, lost youth with its joys and hopes and sorrows.

People instinctively speak softly and reverently in an old-fashioned
attic. Much of the irreverence of the young generation is due to the
fact that men have stopped building the wide, deep fireplaces of old
and the old-fashioned style of attic. When you take the family
hearthstone and the prayer and memory closet out of a home you must
expect irreverence.

There were plenty of wonderful attics in Green Valley, but not many
were so crowded with colorful riches as the attic which Cynthia's son
owned. When Cynthia was a girl that attic was generously stored.
Cynthia's mother made her pilgrimages to it and added to its wealth of
memories. Before Cynthia herself sailed away to far-off India she
carried armfuls of her own heart treasures up there. One gray day,
twenty gray days, could not exhaust this Green Valley attic.

Cynthia's son, being a man, went up heedlessly, even a little noisily,
for attics were to him a new thing. Nan went breathlessly, her heart
thumping with delight. She guessed that much joy and beauty and wonder
lay stored in that great room. Grandma went up slowly and a little
tremblingly. She remembered that the very last time she had climbed
those attic stairs Cynthia had been with her. Their arms had been full
of treasure and their eyes had been full of tears.

The three now had no sooner reached the last step than the attic laid
its mystic hush upon them. They stood still and looked about, each
somehow waiting for one of the others to speak. It was Grandma who
broke the silence softly:

"You had some of the old furniture moved there in the corner but the
rest is just as it was forty years ago--when I was here last."

Grandma knew the history of pretty near everything in sight and they
followed her about, looking and listening. Somehow there was at first
no desire to touch and handle things. But soon the strange charm of an
old attic stole over them and they began to look more closely at
things, to exclaim over weird relics, to touch old books and quaint
garments. Then as the wonders multiplied and the rain drummed steadily
on the roof, time and the world without was forgotten and the three
became absorbed in the past.

When first she had looked about her Grandma's eyes