ra felt a moist spot
on her cheek,--could it be a tear?

CHAPTER XXXV

THE TOOTHACRE COTTAGE

Aunt Roxy and Aunt Ruey Toothacre lived in a little one-story
gambrel-roofed cottage, on the side of Harpswell Bay, just at the head
of the long cove which we have already described. The windows on two
sides commanded the beautiful bay and the opposite shores, and on the
other they looked out into the dense forest, through whose deep shadows
of white birch and pine the silver rise and fall of the sea daily
revealed itself.

The house itself was a miracle of neatness within, for the two thrifty
sisters were worshipers of soap and sand, and these two tutelary deities
had kept every board of the house-floor white and smooth, and also every
table and bench and tub of household use. There was a sacred care over
each article, however small and insignificant, which composed their
slender household stock. The loss or breakage of one of them would have
made a visible crack in the hearts of the worthy sisters,--for every
plate, knife, fork, spoon, cup, or glass was as intimate with them, as
instinct with home feeling, as if it had a soul; each defect or spot had
its history, and a cracked dish or article of furniture received as
tender and considerate medical treatment as if it were capable of
understanding and feeling the attention.

It was now a warm, spicy day in June,--one of those which bring out the
pineapple fragrance from the fir-shoots, and cause the spruce and
hemlocks to exude a warm, resinous perfume. The two sisters, for a
wonder, were having a day to themselves, free from the numerous calls
of the vicinity for twelve miles round. The room in which they were
sitting was bestrewn with fragments of dresses and bonnets, which were
being torn to pieces in a most wholesale way, with a view to a general
rejuvenescence. A person of unsympathetic temperament, and disposed to
take sarcastic views of life, might perhaps wonder what possible object
these two battered and weather-beaten old bodies proposed to themselves
in this process,--whether Miss Roxy's gaunt black-straw helmet, which
she had worn defiantly all winter, was likely to receive much lustre
from being pressed over and trimmed with an old green ribbon which that
energetic female had colored black by a domestic recipe; and whether
Miss Roxy's rusty bombazette would really seem to the world any fresher
for being ripped, and washed, and turned, for the second o