cider was a specific to that end: Polly talked while she ate, and ate
while she talked. But while she finishes her luncheon, let us make known
to the patient reader whom and what the tailoress discusses.

John Boynton was a step-cousin of Lizzy Griswold's. Her youngest aunt
had married a widower, with one son, some five years older than Lizzy,
and had always lived in the old homestead at Coventry, with her father;
while the other daughters and sons, six in number, were scattered over
the State, returning once a year, at Thanksgiving, to visit their
birthplace, and bring their children into acquaintance with each other.
Eben Griswold, who lived at Greenfield, was nearer home than any of the
others, and Lizzy, consequently, oftener at her grandfather's house than
her cousins. She and John Boynton were playmates from childhood, and it
was not strange that John, who had never known a pleasure unshared by
Lizzy, or suffered a pain without her consolation, should grow up in
the idea that he could not possibly live without her, an idea also
entertained half-consciously by Miss Lizzy, though neither of them ever
yet had expressed it; for John was poor, and had no home to offer any
woman, much less the petted child of a rich farmer. So Mr. Boynton, Jr.,
left home to teach school in Roxbury, five years before the date of our
story, without making any confidences on the subject of his hopes
and fears to Miss Griswold; and she knit him stockings and hemmed
pocket-handkerchiefs for him with the most cold-blooded perseverance,
and nobody but the yarn and the needles knew whether she dropped any
tears on them or not.

Now it had always been John Boynton's custom to give his school
Thanksgiving-week as a vacation,--to take the train on Monday for
Greenfield, and stay there till Wednesday, when the whole family set off
together for Coventry, to spend the next day, according to time-honored