professes to follow in the expectation of being rewarded for so doing, but her head is held high when she doesn’t care to see the lowly ones He came to give light and life to.  I don’t mean she doesn’t give old clothes and food and sometimes a little wood to old Mrs. Snicker, who can’t move, from rheumatism, but she would no more speak other than stiffly to some of the people I know here than she would go in for suffrage.  She doesn’t realize she is a living woman.  She thinks she is an Ancestor.  For years she has forbidden Taylor French to come to her house, and Amy has to see him elsewhere.

She has seen a good deal of him lately, Amy has.  Taylor doesn’t live in Twickenham Town now.  He is living in North Carolina and has a good position, and is able to get married (I know because I asked him), and any minute day or night in the past eighteen months in which Amy would have agreed he would have married her and taken her away, but Amy wouldn’t agree.  Things have been dragging along this way so long that the nerves of both are frazzled out, and there’s nothing to hope for but death, and, of course, it isn’t respectful to think too hopefully of death and a grandmother.  And then I popped in and gave things a little push and the curtain dropped.

The way it dropped was this.  I mean the way they got married.  Taylor was in town the last two weeks in August, and, as everybody invited him to their parties, he and Amy managed to see a good deal of each other (also the seeing wasn’t altogether at places where other people were around).  But she wasn’t allowed to meet him on the square or to receive letters from him straight.  And sometimes, if he wanted to say something in a hurry, or send her candy or a new book, or any of the usuals, he had to give a signal by throwing pebbles on her window at night, and then she would throw out a string and he would tie the thing to it and she would haul up, and the Personage, who was usually asleep, would be none the wiser.  The Personage is deaf, which is a great help.

Well, one night three of the town girls and myself, with a boy apiece, had been to see Amy, and when we went up-stairs (just the girls) to see a new hat a city cousin had sent her, we heard a little tap at the west window.  It had been raining, which accounted for our being indoors with the windows lowered, and when we heard the tapping we were so excited we could hardly breathe.  It was fearfully thrilly, just like things one reads about in books, and I told the girls to put out the light quick, and when it was out I went to the window and saw Taylor standing in the shadow of a big tree.  He signaled me to drop the line, but when I threw the piece of twine Amy gave me I threw it wrong and it got caught in a broken piece of shingle on the edge of the porch and hung there.  I couldn’t get it back and Taylor couldn’t get it down, and, seeing it was necessary for something to be done, I pushed aside the curtains (they were made of striped calico,