at the foot of Deer Hollow.  Her married son and his family live with her.  In this house, there is first of all my husband.  I’m so sorry he is away in Canada just now, on lumbering business.  He is Neale Crittenden, a Williams man, who in his youth had thoughts of exploring the world but who has turned out head of the ‘Crittenden Manufacturing Company,’ which is the high-sounding name of a smallish wood-working business on the other side of the field next our house.  You can see the buildings and probably hear the saws from your garden.  Properly speaking, you know, you don’t live in Ashley but in ‘Crittenden’s’ and your house constitutes one quarter of all the residences in that settlement.  There are yours, and ours, the mill-buildings, the house where an old cousin of mine lives, and the Powers’ house, although that is so far away, nearly half a mile, that it is really only a farm-house in the country. We, you see, are the suburb of Ashley.”

Marsh laughed out again at this, and she laughed with him, their eyes, shining with amusement, meeting in a friendly glance.

“The mill is the most important member of Crittenden’s, of course.  Part of the mill-building is pre-Revolutionary, and very picturesque.  In the life-time of my husband’s uncle, it still ran by water-power with a beautiful, enormous old mossy water-wheel.  But since we took it over, we’ve had to put in modern machinery very prosaically and run it on its waste of slabs, mostly.  All sorts of small, unimportant objects are manufactured there, things you never heard of probably.  Backs of hair-brushes, wooden casters to put under beds and chairs, rollers for cotton mills.  As soon as my husband returns, I’ll ask him to take you through it.  That and the old church are the only historic monuments in town.”

She stopped and asked him meditatively, “What else do you suppose I need to forestall old Mrs. Powers on?  My old Cousin Hetty perhaps.  She has a last name, Allen—­yes, some connection with Ethan Allen.  I am, myself.  But everybody has always called her Miss Hetty till few people remember that she has another name.  She was born there in the old house below ‘the Burning,’ and she has lived there for eighty years, and that is all her saga.  You can’t see her house from here, but it is part of Crittenden’s all the same, although it is a mile away by the main road as you go towards the Dug-Way.  But you can reach it in six or seven minutes from here by a back lane, through the Eagle Rock woods.”

“What nice names!” Mr. Welles luxuriated in them.  “The Eagle Rock woods.  The Dug-Way.  The Burning.  Deer Hollow.”

“I bet you don’t know what they mean,” Vincent challenged him.  Vincent was always throwing challenges, at everything.  But by this time he had learned how to dodge them.  “No, I don’t know, and I don’t care if I don’t,” he answered happily.

It pleased him that Mrs. Crittenden found this amusing, so that she looked at him laughing.  How her eyes glistened when she laughed.  It made you laugh back.  He risked another small attempt at facetiousness.  “Go on with the census of Crittenden’s,” he told her.  “I want to know all about my future fellow-citizens.  You haven’t even finished up this house, anybody but your husband.”