No one seeing Babbie going to church demurely on Gavin’s arm could guess her history.  Sometimes I wonder whether the desire to be a gypsy again ever comes over her for a mad hour, and whether, if so, Gavin takes such measures to cure her as he threatened in Caddam Wood.  I suppose not; but here is another story: 

“When I ask mother to tell me about her once being a gypsy she says I am a bad ’quisitive little girl, and to put on my hat and come with her to the prayer-meeting; and when I asked father to let me see mother’s gypsy frock he made me learn Psalm forty-eight by heart.  But once I see’d it, and it was a long time ago, as long as a week ago.  Micah Dow gave me rowans to put in my hair, and I like Micah because he calls me Miss, and so I woke in my bed because there was noises, and I ran down to the parlor, and there was my mother in her gypsy frock, and my rowans was in her hair, and my father was kissing her, and when they saw me they jumped; and that’s all.”

“Would you like me to tell you another story?  It is about a little girl.  Well, there was once a minister and his wife, and they hadn’t no little girls, but just little boys, and God was sorry for them, so He put a little girl in a cabbage in the garden, and when they found her they were glad.  Would you like me to tell you who the little girl was?  Well, it was me, and, ugh!  I was awful cold in the cabbage.  Do you like that story?”

“Yes; I like it best of all the stories I know.”

“So do I like it, too.  Couldn’t nobody help loving me, ’cause I’m so nice?  Why am I so fearful nice?”

“Because you are like your grandmother.”

“It was clever of my father to know when he found me in the cabbage that my name was Margaret.  Are you sorry grandmother is dead?”

“I am glad your mother and father were so good to her and made her so happy.”

“Are you happy?”

“Yes.”

“But when I am happy I laugh.”

“I am old, you see, and you are young.”

“I am nearly six.  Did you love grandmother?  Then why did you never come to see her?  Did grandmother know you was here?  Why not?  Why didn’t I not know about you till after grandmother died?”

“I’ll tell you when you are big.”

“Shall I be big enough when I am six?”

“No, not till your eighteenth birthday.”

“But birthdays comes so slow.  Will they come quicker when I am big?”

“Much quicker.”

On her sixth birthday Micah Dow drove my little maid to the school-house in the doctor’s gig, and she crept beneath the table and whispered—­

“Grandfather!”

“Father told me to call you that if I liked, and I like,” she said when I had taken her upon my knee.  “I know why you kissed me just now.  It was because I looked like grandmother.  Why do you kiss me when I look like her?”

“Who told you I did that?”

“Nobody didn’t tell me.  I just found out.  I loved grandmother too.  She told me all the stories she knew.”