The old woman opposed to his arguments nothing but a passionately bare denial.  “No!  No!  No!  We’re different!  It’s in your blood to give up because you can reason it all out that you’re beaten,” She stood up, shaking with her vehemence.  “It’s in my blood to fight and fight and fight—­”

“And then what?” asked the sculptor, as she hesitated.

“Go on fighting!” she cried.

III

She was seventy-one years old when she first flew this flag, and for the next four years she battled unceasingly under its bold motto against odds that rapidly grew more overwhelming as the process that had been imperceptibly draining Greenford of its population gained impetus with it own action.  In the beginning people moved to Johnsonville because they could get work in the print mill, but after a time they went because the others had gone.  Before long there was no cobbler in Greenford because there was so little cobbling to do.  After that the butcher went away, then the carpenter, and finally the grocery-store was shut up and deserted by the man whose father and grandfather had kept store in the same building for sixty years.  It was the old story.  He had a large family of children who needed education and “a chance.”

The well-kept old village still preserved its outer shell of quaintness and had a constantly increasing charm for summering strangers who rejoiced with a shameless egoism in the death-like quiet of the moribund place, and pointed out to visiting friends from the city the tufts of grass beginning to grow in the main street as delightful proofs of the tranquillity of their summer retreat.

Miss Abigail overheard a conversation to this effect one day between some self-invited visitors to her wonderful garden.  Her heart burned and her face blackened.  “You might as well,” she told them, “laugh at the funny faces of a person who’s choking to death!”

The urbane city people turned amused and inquiring faces upon her.  “How so?”

“Roads aren’t for grass to grow in!” she fulminated.  “They’re for folks to use, for men and women and little children to go over to and from their homes.”

“Ah, economic conditions,” they began to murmur.  “The inevitable laws of supply and—­”

“Get out of my garden!” Miss Abigail raged at them.  “Get out!”

They had scuttled before her, laughing at her quaint verocity, and she had sworn wrath fully never to let another city dweller inside her gate—­a resolution which she was forced to forego as time passed on and she became more and more hard pressed for ammunition.