her voice struck him. He went over to her and looked at her, and found her suffering from acute pneumonia. He at once set to work on her. He took the other patient up in his arms and carried her into another room, where he told her that Cousin Fanny was a desperately ill woman. “She was actually dying then, sir,” he said to me,       “and she died that night. When she arrived at the place the night before, which was not until after nine o’clock, she had gone to the stable herself to put up her old mare, or rather to see that she was fed—she always did that—so when she got into the house she was wet and chilled through, and she had to go to bed. She must have had on wet clothes,” he said.     

       I asked him if she knew she was going to die. He said he did not think she did; that he did not tell her, and she talked about nothing except her Christmas-tree and the people she wanted to see. He heard her praying in the night, “and, by the way,” he said, “she mentioned you. She shortly became rather delirious, and wandered a good deal, talking of things that must have happened when she was young; spoke of going to see her mother somewhere. The last thing she ever said was something about fashion, which,” he said, “showed how ingrained is vanity in the female mind.” The doctor knows something of human nature. He concluded what he had to say with, “She was in some respects a very remarkable woman—if she had not been an old maid. I do not suppose that she ever drew a well breath in her life. Not that I think old maids cannot be very acceptable women,” he apologized. “They are sometimes very useful.” The doctor was a rather enlightened man.     

       Some of her relatives got there in time for the funeral, and a good many of the poor people came; and she was carried in a little old spring wagon, drawn by Fashion, through the snow, to the old home place, where Scroggs very kindly let them dig the grave, and was buried there in the old graveyard in the garden, in a vacant space just beside her mother, with the children around her. I really miss her a great deal. The other boys say they do the same. I suppose it is the trouble she used to give us.     

       The old set are all doing well. Doug is a professor. He says the word       “spinster” gave him a twist to philology. Old Blinky is in Paris. He had a picture in the salon last year, an autumn landscape, called “Le Cote du Bois”. I believe the translation of that is “The Woodside”. His 

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