“Will you please tell me your name, sir?” she said.

“John Hopkins,” replied the man, smiling kindly at her.

“Captain John Hopkins,” corrected his wife.

Letitia gasped.  That settled it.  Captain John Hopkins was her great-great-great-grandfather.  Great-aunt Peggy had often told her about him.  He had been a notable man in his day, among the first settlers, and many a story concerning him had come down to his descendants.  A queer miniature of him, in a little gilt frame, hung in the best parlor, and Letitia had often looked at it.  She had thought from the first that there was something familiar about the man’s face, and now she recognized the likeness to the miniature.

It seemed awful, and impossible, but the little green door led into the past, and Letitia Hopkins was visiting her great-great-great-grandfather and grandmother, great-great-grandmother, and her great-great-aunts.

Letitia looked up in the faces, all staring wonderingly at her, and all of them had that familiar look, though she had no miniature of the others.  Suddenly she knew that it was a likeness to her own face which she recognized, and it was as if she saw herself in a looking-glass.  She felt as if her head was turning round and round, and presently her feet began to follow the motion of her head, then strong arms caught her, or she would have fallen.

When Letitia came to herself again, she was in a great feather bed, in the unfinished loft of the log-house.  The wind blew in her face, a great star shone in her eyes.  She thought at first she was out of doors.  Then she heard a kind but commanding voice repeating:  “Open your mouth,” and stared up wildly into her great-great-great-grandmother’s face, then around the strange little garret, lighted with a wisp of rag in a pewter dish of tallow, and the stars shining through the crack in the logs.  Not a bit of furniture was there in the room, besides the bed and an oak chest.  Some queer-looking garments hung about on pegs and swung in the draughts of the wind.  It must have been snowing outside, for little piles of snow were scattered here and there about the room.

“Where—­am—­I?” Letitia asked feebly, but no sooner had she opened her mouth than her great-great-great-grandmother, Goodwife Hopkins, who had been watching her chance, popped in the pewter spoon full of some horribly black and bitter medicine.

Letitia nearly choked.

“Swallow it,” said Goodwife Hopkins.  “You swooned away, and it is good physic.  It will soon make you well.”

Goodwife Hopkins had a kind and motherly way, but a way from which there was no appeal.  Letitia swallowed the bitter dose.

“Now go to sleep,” ordered Goodwife Hopkins.

Letitia went to sleep.  There might have been something quieting to the nerves in the good physic.  She was awakened a little later by her great-great-grandmother and her two great-great-aunts coming to bed.  They were to sleep with her.  There were only two beds in Captain John Hopkins’s house.