crisp and dry, drove them past the ancient church, along Notre Dame
Street, across the Champ de Mars to St. Dominique Street, and heaped
them sportively in the doorway of a quaint French-Canadian cottage.

There huddling apprehensively together, the door opened, just as the
wind with renewed vigor beat down upon them once more. For a few
moments a weird, bent figure, crutch in hand, stood in the doorway
gasping for breath, her claw-like hands brushing away the leaves,
which clung to her as if affrighted. The weight of years bore upon her
so heavily that she scarcely had strength to close the door in the
face of the riotous storm. As she stood panting and wheezing in the
little parlor, into which the street door opened, she made a
remarkable picture. She was clad in a dark, ill-fitting dress,
fastened around the waist by a broad strip of faded yellow ribbon;
about her neck the parchment-like skin hung in heavy folds, while her
entire face was seamed over and over with deep wrinkles, giving it a
marvellously aged appearance.

At length her strength returned, and she muttered as she hobbled
across the room: "The storm is worse; I fear she cannot go out
to-night." Reaching an ancient door, from which the paint had faded
years before, she turned the handle, when a strange sight was
revealed. Kneeling before a plaster cast of the Virgin, with a string
of bone prayer-beads in her hands, was another aged woman. Ranged on
either side of the statue were two colored wax candles, lighting up
the face of the devout worshipper, whose hair the years had bleached
white as snow. She was twenty years younger than her crippled sister,
who had defied death for nearly a hundred years.

On seeing the image and the worshipper, the sister in the doorway