“Yes, I know, Maud and Flo do brag awfully now and then; but they are nice girls, and it is a nice family, mamma says.”

“Every one seems to say that about them, and I’ve often wondered what they meant.  I’m sure Mr. Aplin isn’t very nice.  He has no end of money, I know, but he can be so rude, and Mrs. Aplin is so patronizing.  Now, why should they be called such ’nice people’?”

Kitty straightened herself up, put on a very knowing look, and repeated parrot-like what she had heard older persons say,—­

“Mrs. Aplin was a Windlow.”

“What in the world is a Windlow?” asked Laura, rather sarcastically.

Kitty was a worldly young woman, but she was also full of fun; and this question of Laura’s amused her mightily, and with a suppressed giggle she answered demurely:  “I think it has something to do with windows.  The Windlows were English, and I believe their business was to open and shut the windows in the king’s palaces,—­perhaps to wash them.  This all began ages ago, and it was considered a great honor, a tip-top thing to do, especially when the windows were high up.  The honor has descended from generation to generation, and the name with it, I believe.  They had some very ordinary name at the start.”

The giggle, that had been suppressed up to this point, now burst forth in a shout of laughter, wherein Laura herself joined, exclaiming, as she did so, “Oh, Kitty, you are so ridiculous!”

“Why don’t you make a rhyme and say, ‘Oh, Kitty, you’re so witty’?  But, Laura, it is you who are odd and ridiculous, to pretend that you don’t know that Windlow is one of the oldest names of one of the oldest families who came over to America in the Mayflower,—­regular old aristocrats.”

“Now, Kitty, I’m up in my history, if I’m not on this society stuff, and just let me tell you that those first settlers of America who came over in the Mayflower were not aristocrats.”

“Oh, Laura, when everybody who can, brags of a Mayflower ancestor!  I heard Mrs. Arkwright say to mamma, the other day that the Aplins were of the real old Mayflower blue blood.”

“Then Mrs. Arkwright, with the ‘everybody’ you tell of, doesn’t know what history says.”

“Why, I’m sure I thought that was history.”

“Well, it isn’t.  Last year I went with my father to Plymouth, and he took me to the famous rock where the Mayflower pilgrims landed, and afterward he gave me a lovely book called ‘The Olden Time,’ by Edmund Sears, that told me all about the pilgrims,—­who they were, and why they came over, and everything, and I remember it said in this book that the Plymouth pilgrims were constantly confounded—­those were the very words—­with the Puritans who came over nine years later to Massachusetts.”

“But Plymouth is in Massachusetts.”

“Yes, I know, but it wasn’t in that day.  It was simply Plymouth Colony. 
The Mayflower sailed by Cape Cod into Plymouth Bay.  They named the bay
Plymouth, as they named the town Plymouth, for the old Plymouth in
England.”