full hour before it was time for the stage she went a little way up the
mountain with Jimmy, and they took turns gazing down the winding, dusty
road through a spy-glass. "I shan't wait here any longer. What's the
use?" declared Jimmy.

"She's coming! she's coming! I saw her first!" was Lucy's glad cry. And
she ran down the mountain in haste, though the stage, a grayish green
one, was just turning a curve at least a mile away.

"Well, you _have_ been parted a good while," said Uncle James, as the
two dear friends met and embraced on the coach steps; "a day and a
half!"

"I'd have 'most died if I'd waited any longer," said Aunt Lucy, putting
her arm around her niece and leading her up the gravel path with the
pink "old hen and chickens" on either side.

The little girls were entirely unlike, and the contrast was pleasant to
see. Lucy was very fair, with light curling hair:--

"Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds
That ope in the month of May."

Bab was quite as pretty, but in another way. She had brilliant dark eyes
and straight dark hair with a satin gloss. She was half a head shorter
than her "auntie," though their ages were about the same. People liked
to see them together, for they were always sociable and happy, and loved
each other "dearilee."