the ornament of a meek and lowly spirit, especially girls, who
have more use for it than boys.

R.R.R.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

STORIES AND PEOPLE

October, 187--

There are people in books and people in Riverboro, and they are
not the same kind. They never talk of chargers and palfreys in
the village, nor say How oft and Methinks, and if a Scotchman out
of Rob Roy should come to Riverboro and want to marry one of us
girls we could not understand him unless he made motions; though
Huldah Meserve says if a nobleman of high degree should ask her
to be his,--one of vast estates with serfs at his bidding,--she
would be able to guess his meaning in any language.

Uncle Jerry Cobb thinks that Riverboro people would not make a
story, but I know that some of them would.

Jack-o'-lantern, though only a baby, was just like a real story
if anybody had written a piece about him: How his mother was dead
and his father ran away and Emma Jane and I got Aunt Sarah Cobb
to keep him so Mr. Perkins wouldn't take him to the poor farm;
and about our lovely times with him that summer, and our dreadful
loss when his father remembered him in the fall and came to take
him away; and how Aunt Sarah carried the trundle bed up attic