I besought mother, as she fled, to tell me what ailed aunty.  “Don’t ask me,” she answered.  “The dear only knows.  As for me, I have given up thinking, let alone asking, what either your aunt or your father would be at.”  And away she went, perturbed-spirit fashion, and Aunt Clara laughed louder than ever.  Indeed, before she had only chuckled and silently shaken her sides; now she broke out into a scream.

“Well, I never!” she said.  “That flounce of your mother’s out of the room was certainly as much like old times as if the thing had happened yesterday.”

“What had happened yesterday?” asked Jerusha and I, both in a breath.

“O, I shall die of laughing,” said Aunt Clara.

“We shall die of impatience,” said I, “if you don’t tell us what you mean.”

“No you won’t.  Nobody, especially no woman, ever yet died of unsatisfied curiosity.  It rather keeps folks alive.”

We very well knew that nothing would be made of Aunt Clara by teasing her.  So Jerusha turned over the great family Bible, her custom always of a Sunday afternoon.  Over her shoulder I happened to see that the good book was open at the first chapter of I Chronicles, “Adam, Sheth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalaleel, Jared.”  Though her lips moved diligently, I am afraid she did not make much of it.  As for me, I turned to the window, and studied the landscape.  Father, his custom of a Sunday afternoon, walked down into the meadow, and the cattle came affectionately up to him.  It was the salt in his broad pocket that they were after.  “I might salt them of a Monday,” he says, “but they kind of look for it, and it isn’t kind to disappoint the creetur’s on a Sabba’-day.  And the merciful man is merciful to his beasts.”

The flies droned and buzzed that summer afternoon.  Jerusha nodded over the big Bible.  Aunt Clara tried to look serious over the book she held.  But the latent laugh was coursing among the dimples in her face, like a spark among tinder.  I stole up behind, and, leaning over her shoulder, kissed her.

“O, yes,” said aunty.  “Fine words butter no parsnips, and fine kisses are no better.”

Jerusha’s head made an awful plunge, then a reactionary lift back, and then she opened her eyes and her mouth with such a yawn!

“Why, what a mouth!” I cried.  “Master Minim would rejoice if you would thus open out in singing-school,

    ‘And vie with Gabriel, while he sings.’”

Off went Aunt Clara in the laugh again, and this time till the tears came.  We saw now that there was something in that line which provoked her mirth; but what Gabriel could have to do with her strange behavior we could not imagine, and were wisely silent.

“Girls,” she said, as soon as she could speak for laughing, “I will tell you.”

We knew she would, provided we were not too anxious to hear.  So Jerusha turned over her leaf to the second chapter of I Chronicles, “Reuben, Simeon, Levi.”  I pretended to be more than ever interested out of doors.  Aunt Clara took off her specs, closed her book, smoothed her apron, and began:—­