a, down Stony Creek Road. How that girl did
take to me! She used to say she knew the sound of my hoofs on the road,
of a still night, when we were a mile away; and she'd say over a little
rhyme she'd got hold of somehow:--

'Star, Star, good and bright,
I wish you may and I wish you might
Bring somebody to me I want to see to-night.'

"If she said that twice, looking straight down the road, she told us we
were sure to come. She was a plump rosy-cheeked girl when Master Fred
brought her to be mistress here, though you mightn't think it to see her
now, what with the cooking and the dairy-work and raising a big family
of children. But if you want to know what mistress was like twenty years
ago, you've only to look at our Ada.

"Now, there's a girl for you, as good as she is pretty, and getting to
be a woman grown; though I remember, as though it happened yesterday,
her mother's coming out one spring day to where I was nibbling grass in
the door-yard, with her baby in her arms, and holding up the little
thing to me, and saying, 'This is Ada, Star,--you must be good friends
with Ada,' Friends! I should say so. Before that child was a year old,
she used to cry to be held on my back for a ride, and when she was
getting better of the scarlet fever, she kept saying, 'Me 'ant to tee
ole 'Tar,' till, to pacify her, they led me to the open window of the
room where she lay, and she reached her mite of a hand from the bed to
stroke my nose and give me the lump of sugar she had saved for me under
her pillow.

"Bless the child! And it was just so with all the rest, Tim and Martha
and Fred and Jenny and baby May--there was a new baby in that house
every year. Those young ones would crawl over me, and sit on me, when I
was lying down in the stable; ride me, three or four at a time, without
bridle or saddle, and cling to my neck and tail when there was no room
left on my back. They shared their apples and gingerbread with me, and
brought me goodies on a plate sometimes so that I might eat my dinner,
they said, 'like the rest of the folks,' I fetched them to and from
school, and trotted every day to the post-office and the Corners to do
the family errands; and when our Ada was old enough to be trusted to
drive, the whole lot of them would pile into the carryall, and away we
would go for a long ride, through the lanes and the shady woods that
border the pond, stopping a dozen times for the girls to clamber out and
pick the