the mourning friends to their seats; and I have no reason to doubt that she sometimes even had the immense responsibility of making out the order of the procession, since she had all genealogy and relationship at her tongue’s end.  It was an awful thing in Deephaven, we found, if the precedence was wrongly assigned, and once we chanced to hear some bitter remarks because the cousins of the departed wife had been placed after the husband’s relatives,—­“the blood-relations ridin’ behind them that was only kin by marriage!  I don’t wonder they felt hurt!” said the person who spoke; a most unselfish and unassuming soul, ordinarily.

Mrs. Patton knew everybody’s secrets, but she told them judiciously if at all.  She chattered all day to you as a sparrow twitters, and you did not tire of her; and Kate and I were never more agreeably entertained than when she told us of old times and of Kate’s ancestors and their contemporaries; for her memory was wonderful, and she had either seen everything that had happened in Deephaven for a long time, or had received the particulars from reliable witnesses.  She had known much trouble; her husband had been but small satisfaction to her, and it was not to be wondered at if she looked upon all proposed marriages with compassion.  She was always early at church, and she wore the same bonnet that she had when Kate was a child; it was such a well-preserved, proper black straw bonnet, with discreet bows of ribbon, and a useful lace veil to protect it from the weather.

She showed us into the best room the first time we went to see her.  It was the plainest little room, and very dull, and there was an exact sufficiency about its furnishings.  Yet there was a certain dignity about it; it was unmistakably a best room, and not a place where one might make a litter or carry one’s every-day work.  You felt at once that somebody valued the prim old-fashioned chairs, and the two half-moon tables, and the thin carpet, which must have needed anxious stretching every spring to make it come to the edge of the floor.  There were some mourning-pieces by way of decoration, inscribed with the names of Mrs. Patton’s departed friends,—­two worked in crewel to the memory of her father and mother, and two paper memorials, with the woman weeping under the willow at the side of a monument.  They were all brown with age; and there was a sampler beside, worked by “Judith Beckett, aged ten,” and all five were framed in slender black frames and hung very high on the walls.  There was a rocking-chair which looked as if it felt too grand for use, and considered itself imposing.  It tilted far back on its rockers, and was bent forward at the top to make one’s head uncomfortable.  It need not have troubled itself; nobody would ever wish to sit there.  It was such a big rocking-chair, and Mrs. Patton was proud of it; always generously urging her guests to enjoy its comfort, which was imaginary with her, as she was so short that she could hardly have climbed into it without assistance.