recognition for past merits, but a becoming silence had been maintained as to their present status.  The only recognized survivors of the old house of Ramsey at that time were the widow, Amelia Ramsey, the wife of Anderson Ramsey, deceased, as she appeared in the minutes of the meetings, and her son George, a lad of sixteen, and the same who, in patched attire, had made love to Maria over the garden fence when she was a child.  It was about that time that the meetings were taking place, and the name of the village had been changed to Amity.  It had been held to be a happy, even a noble and generous thought, on the part of Josiah Saunders.  “Would that in such wise, by a combination of poetical aspirations and practical deeds, all differences might be adjusted upon this globe,” said the Amity Argus, in an account of the meeting.  Thenceforth, Ramsey Four Corners became Amity, and the most genteel of the ladies had Amity engraved on their note-paper.

Mrs. Amelia Ramsey and George, who had suffered somewhat in their feelings, in spite of the poetical adjustment of the difference, had no note-paper.  They were poor, else Amity might never have been.  They lived in a house which had been, in its day, as pretentious as the Saunders mansion.  At the time of Maria’s first visit to Amity it had been a weather-beaten old structure, which had not been painted for years, and had a curious effect as of a blur on the landscape, with its roof and walls of rain and sun stained shingles and clapboards, its leaning chimneys, and its Corinthian pillars widely out of the perpendicular, supporting crazily the roofs of the double veranda.  When Maria went to Amity to begin teaching, the old house had undergone a transformation.  She gazed at it with amazement out of the sitting-room window, which faced it, on the afternoon of her arrival.

“Why, what has happened to the old Ramsey house?” she asked her aunt Maria.

“Well, in the first place, a cousin died and left them some money,” replied Aunt Maria.  “It was a matter of ten thousand dollars.  Then Amelia and George went right to work and fixed up the house.  It was none of my business, but it seemed dreadful silly to me.  If I had been in their place, I’d have let that old ramshackle of a place go to pot and bought a nice little new house.  There was one they could have got for fifteen hundred dollars, on this side of the river; but no, they went to work, and they must have laid out three thousand clear on that old thing.”

“It is beautiful!” said Maria, regarding it with admiration.

“Well, I don’t think it’s very beautiful, but everybody to their liking,” replied Aunt Maria, with a sniff of her high, transparent nostrils.  “For my part, I’d rather have a little, clean new house before all the old ones, that folks have died in and worried in, in creation.”

But Maria continued to regard the renovated Ramsey house with admiration.  It stood close to the street, as is the case with so many old houses in rural New England.  It had a tiny brick strip of yard in front, on which was set, on either side of the stoop, a great century-plant in a pot.  Above them rose a curving flight of steps to a broad veranda, supported with Corinthian pillars, which were now upright and glistening with white paint, as was the entire house.