I was detained, that afternoon, and did not reach her house until nearly four; and I was almost the last to arrive.  I found Cousin Tryphena very silent, her usually pale face very red, the center of a group of neighbors who all at once began to tell me what had happened.  I could make nothing out of their incoherent explanations. ...  “Trypheny was crazy ... she’d ought to have a guardeen ... that Canuck shoemaker had addled her brains ... there’d ought to be a law against that kind of newspaper. ...  Trypheny was goin’ like her great-aunt, Lucilly, that died in the asylum. ...”  I appealed directly to Cousin Tryphena for information as to what the trouble was.

“There ain’t any trouble ’s I know of,” she answered in a shaking voice.  “I’ve just heard of a widow-woman, down in the city, who’s bringin’ up her two children in the corner of a basement where the green mold stands out on the wall, and I’m goin’ down to fetch her an’ the children up here to live with me ... them an’ a little orphan boy as don’t like the ’sylum where they’ve put him——­”

Somebody broke in on her to cry, “Why, Trypheny, you simple old critter, that’s four people!  Where you goin’ to put ’em in this little tucked-up place?”

Cousin Tryphena answered doggedly and pointedly, “Your own grandmother, Rebecca Mason, brought up a family of seven in a house no bigger than this, and no cellar.”

“But how, ...” another voice exclaimed, “air you goin’ to get enough for ’em to eat?  You ain’t got but barely enough for yourself!”

Cousin Tryphena paled a little, “I’m a good sewer, I could make money sewing ... and I could do washings for city-folks, summer-times....”  Her set mouth told what a price she paid for this voluntary abandonment of the social standing that had been hers by virtue of her idleness.  She went on with sudden spirit, “You all act as though I was doin’ it to spite you and to amuse myself!  I don’t want to!  When I think of my things I’ve kept so nice always, I’m wild ... but how can I help it, now I know about ’em!  I didn’t sleep a wink last night.  I’ll go clean crazy if I don’t do something!  I saw those three children strugglin’ in the water and their mother a-holdin’ on ’em down, and then jumpin’ in herself——­Why, I give enough milk to the cat to keep a baby ... what else can I do?”

I was touched, as I think we all were, by her helpless simplicity and ignorance, and by her defenselessness against this first vision of life, the vision which had been spared her so long, only to burst upon her like a forest-fire.  I hid an odd fancy that she had just awakened after a sleep of half a century.

“Dear Cousin Tryphena,” I said as gently as I could, “you haven’t had a very wide experience of modern industrial or city conditions and there are some phases of this matter which you don’t take into consideration.”  Then I brought out the old, wordy, eminently reasonable arguments we all use to stifle the thrust of self-questioning:  I told her that it was very likely that the editor of that newspaper had invented, or at least greatly exaggerated those stories, and that she would find on investigation that no such family existed.