her little daughter Alice, who live with me, already there. Louisa
keeps the district school, and with her salary, besides the little
which my brother left her, gets along very comfortably. I have a
small sum in bank, besides my house, and we have plenty to live on,
even if we don't have much to spare.

Louisa was full of excitement over the false alarm of fire, and had
heard a reason for it which we never fairly knew to be true, though
nearly all the village believed it. It seems that the little Jameson
boy, so the story ran, had peeped into the kitchen and had seen it
full of smoke from Caroline's smoky chimney when she was kindling the
fire; then had run out into the yard, and seeing the smoke out there
too, and being of such an exceedingly timid temperament, had run out
to the head of the lane calling fire, and had there met Tommy Gregg,
who had spread the alarm and been the means of calling out the fire
department.

Indeed, the story purported to come from Tommy Gregg, who declared
that the boy at Liscom's had "hollered" fire, and when he was asked
where it was had told him at Liscom's. However that may have been, I
looked around at our humble little home, at the lounge which I had
covered myself, at the threadbare carpet on the sitting-room floor,
at the wallpaper which was put on the year before my husband died, at
the vases on the shelf, which had belonged to my mother, and I was
very thankful that I did not care for "extra things" or new furniture
and carpets enough to take boarders who made one feel as if one were
simply a colonist of their superior state, and the Republic was over
and gone.