She hurried her completed pies into the oven with a swiftness of movement she had never lost, her sweet, thin soprano soaring high in the words of a winding old hymn tune: 

  Lord, how we grovel here below,
  Fond of these trifling toys;
  Our souls can neither rise nor go
  To taste supernal joys! ...

It was nearly two o’clock before the big brown horse, indignant at the unwonted invasion of his afternoon leisure, stepped slowly out from the Daggett barn.  On the seat of the old-fashioned vehicle, to which he had been attached by Mrs. Daggett’s skillful hands, that lady herself sat placidly erect, arrayed in her blue and white striped muslin.  Mrs. Daggett conscientiously wore stripes at all seasons of the year:  she had read somewhere that stripes impart to the most rotund of figures an appearance of slimness totally at variance with the facts.  As for blue and white, her favorite combination of stripes, any fabric in those colors looked cool and clean; and there was a vague strain of poetry in Mrs. Daggett’s nature which made her lift her eyes to a blue sky filled with floating white clouds with a sense of rapturous satisfaction wholly unrelated to the state of the weather.

“G’long, Dolly!” she bade the reluctant animal, with a gentle slap of leathern reins over a rotund back.  “Git-ap!”

“Dolly,” who might have been called Caesar, both by reason of his sex and a stubbornly dominant nature, now fortunately subdued by years of chastening experience, strode slowly forward, his eyes rolling, his large hoofs stirring up heavy clouds of dust.  There were sweet-smelling meadows stacked with newly-cured hay on either side of the road, and tufts of red clover blossoms exhaling delicious odors of honey almost under his saturnine nose; but he trotted ponderously on, sullenly aware of the gentle hand on the reins and the mild, persistent voice which bade him “Git-ap, Dolly!”

Miss Lois Daggett, carrying a black silk bag, which contained a prospectus of the invaluable work which she was striving to introduce to an unappreciative public, halted the vehicle before it had reached the outskirts of the village.

“Where you going, Abby?” she demanded, in the privileged tone of authority a wife should expect from her husband’s female relatives.

“Just out in the country a piece, Lois,” replied Mrs. Daggett evasively.

“Well, I guess I’ll git in and ride a ways with you,” said Lois Daggett.  “Cramp your wheel, Abby,” she added sharply.  “I don’t want to git my skirt all dust.”

Miss Daggett was wearing a black alpaca skirt and a white shirtwaist, profusely ornamented with what is known as coronation braid.  Her hair, very tightly frizzed, projected from beneath the brim of her straw hat on both sides.

“I’m going out to see if I can catch that Orr girl this afternoon,” she explained, as she took a seat beside her sister-in-law.  “She ought to want a copy of Famous People—­in the best binding, too.  I ain’t sold a leather-bound yit, not even in Grenoble.  They come in red with gold lettering.  You’d ought to have one, Abby, now that Henry’s gitting more business by the minute.  I should think you might afford one, if you ain’t too stingy.”