family.  Then my husband’s Uncle Burton inherited the house and brought his bride here, and Toucle just stayed on.  She always makes herself useful enough to pay for her food and lodging.  And when his wife died an elderly woman, Toucle still just stayed on, till he died, and then she went right on staying here in the empty house, till my husband and I got here.  We were married in Rome, and made the long trip here without stopping at all.  It was dawn, a June morning, when we arrived.  We walked all the way from the station at Ashley out to the old house, here at Crittenden’s.  And . . .  I’ll never forget the astounded expression on my husband’s face when Toucle rose up out of the long grass in the front yard and bade me welcome.  She’d known me as a little girl when I used to visit here.  She will outlive all of us, Toucle will, and be watching from her room in the woodshed chamber on the dawn of Judgment Day when the stars begin to fall.”

Mr. Welles felt a trifle bewildered by this, and showed it.  She explained further, “But seriously, I must tell you that she is a perfectly harmless and quite uninteresting old herb-gatherer, although the children in the village are a little afraid of her, because she is an Indian, the only one they have ever seen.  She really is an Indian too.  She knows every inch of our valley and the mountains better than any lumberman or hunter or fisherman in Ashley.  She often goes off and doesn’t come back for days.  I haven’t the least idea where she stays.  But she’s very good to our children when she’s here, and I like her capacity for monumental silence.  It gives her very occasional remarks an oracular air, even though you know it’s only because she doesn’t often open her lips.  She helps a little with the house-work, too, although she always looks so absent-minded, as though she were thinking of something very far away.  She’s quite capable of preparing a good meal, for all she never seems to notice what she’s up to.  And she’s the last member of our family except the very coming-and-going little maids I get once in a while.  Ashley is unlike the rest of the world in that it is hard to get domestic servants here.

“Now let me see, whom next to introduce to you.  You know all your immediate neighbors now.  I shall have to begin on Ashley itself.  Perhaps our minister and his wife.  They live in the high-porticoed, tall-pillared white old house next door to the church in the village, on the opposite side from the church-yard.  They are Ashleyans of the oldest rock.  Both of them were born here, and have always lived here.  Mr. Bayweather is seventy-five years old and has never had any other parish.  I do believe the very best thing I can do for you is to send you straight to them, this minute.  There’s nothing Mr. Bayweather doesn’t know about the place or the people.  He has a collection of Ashleyana of all sorts, records, deeds, titles, old letters, family trees.  And for the last forty years he has been very busy writing a history of Ashley.”