“Well, an’ so she did live and got well, though she never grew a mite from that time.  A little wizened-up thing she was, always; but I tell you folks ’round here thought a nawful lot of Aunt Debby!  And Eddie, if you’ll believe it, never took the sickness at all.  They say, sometimes, babies don’t.

“They got a fam’ly to come and work the farm for ’em, and Debby she took care of her little brother, same as she always had.  And he grew up and got married and come to live in this house and Aunt Debby lived with him.  They did set great store by each other!  Grandmother used to laugh and say grandfather and Aunt Debby didn’t need no words to talk together.  I was eight, goin’ on nine—­why, Susie, just your age—­when Aunt Debby died.  I remember as well the last thing she said.  Somebody asked her if she was afraid.  She looked down over the covers—­I can see her now, like a old baby she looked, so little and so light on the big feather-bed, and she said, ‘Is a grain o’ wheat scared when you drop it in the ground?’ I always thought that wa’n’t such a bad thing for a child to hear said.

“She’d wanted to be buried there beside the others and grandfather did it so.  While he was alive he took care of the graves and kept ’em in good order; and after I married and come here to live I did.  But I’m gettin’ on now, and I want you young folks should know ’bout it and do it after I’m gone.

“Now, here, Susie, take this pot of petunias and set it out on the head of the grave that’s got a stone over it.  And if you’re ever inclined to think you have a hard time, just you remember Aunt Debby and shut your teeth and hang on!  If you tip the pot bottom-side up, and knock on it with a stone, it’ll all slip out easy.  Now go along with you.  We’ve got to be starting for home soon.”

There was a brief pause and then the cheerful voice went on:  “If there’s any flower I do despise, it’s petunias!  But ’twas Aunt Debby’s ’special favorite, so I always start a pot real early and have it in blossom when her birthday comes ’round.”

By the sound she was struggling heavily to her feet.  “Yes, do, for goodness’ sakes, haul me up, will ye?  I’m as stiff as an old horse.  I don’t know what makes me so rheumaticky.  My folks ain’t, as a general thing.”

There was so long a silence that the girl inside the house wondered if they were gone, when Mrs. Pritchard’s voice began again:  “I do like to come up here!  It ‘minds me of him an’ me livin’ here when we was young.  We had a good time of it!”

“I never could see,” commented the other, “how you managed when he went away t’ th’ war.”

“Oh, I did the way you do when you have to!  I’d felt he ought to go, you know, as much as he did, so I was willin’ to put in my best licks.  An’ I was young too—­twenty-three—­and only two of the children born then—­and I was as strong as a ox.  I never minded the work any.  ’Twas the days after battles, when we couldn’t get no news, that was the bad part.  Why, I could go to the very spot, over there where the butternut tree stands—­’twas our garden then—­where I heard he was killed at Gettysburg.”