Meantime Thomas Henry’s wagon would be disappearing slowly up the sandy road, giving Patience a chance to get all she could out of it, by eliminating all the errands Thomas Henry could not possibly be going to do in order to arrive at the one he must certainly be bound on.

“They do say he’s courting Eliza Merritt,” she continued, “but Eliza never was a girl to make any man leave his haying.  No, he’s never going to see Eliza, and if it isn’t provisions or love it’s nothing short of sickness.  Now, whoever is sick down there?  It can’t be Mary Ellen, because she takes after her father’s family and they are all hearty.  It must be Mary Ellen’s little girls, and the measles are going the rounds.  It must be they’ve all got the measles.”

If the listeners suggested that possibly one of the little girls might have escaped, the suggestion was decisively put aside.

“No; if one of them had been well, Mary Ellen would have sent her for the doctor.”

Presently Thomas Henry’s cart was heard rumbling back, and sure enough he was returning with the doctor, and Patience hailed him from the gate and demanded news of Mary Ellen.

“Why, all her little girls have the measles,” replied Thomas Henry, “and I had to leave my haying to fetch the doctor.”

“I want to know,” said Patience.

Being the eldest born, Patience had appropriated to herself two rooms in the rambling old farmhouse before her brother’s marriage, from which later comers had never dislodged her, and with that innate respect for the rights and peculiarities of others which was common in the household, she was left to express her secluded life in her own way.  As the habit of retirement grew upon her she created a world of her own, almost as curious and more individually striking than the museum of Cluny.  There was not a square foot in her tiny apartment that did not exhibit her handiwork.  She was very fond of reading, and had a passion for the little prints and engravings of “foreign views,” which she wove into her realm of natural history.  There was no flower or leaf or fruit that she had seen that she could not imitate exactly in wax or paper.  All over the walls hung the little prints and engravings, framed in wreaths of moss and artificial flowers, or in elaborate square frames made of pasteboard.  The pasteboard was cut out to fit the picture, and the margins, daubed with paste, were then strewn with seeds of corn and acorns and hazelnuts, and then the whole was gilded so that the effect was almost as rich as it was novel.  All about the rooms, in nooks and on tables, stood baskets and dishes of fruit-apples and plums and peaches and grapes-set in proper foliage of most natural appearance, like enough to deceive a bird or the Sunday-school scholars, when on rare occasions they were admitted into this holy of holies.  Out of boxes, apparently filled with earth in the corners of the rooms, grew what seemed to be vines trained to run all about the