simply, in black, and her costume was not of the latest mode.

"I don't see anything about her to have made Mrs. Fulsom think she
was rich," Mrs. Whittle whispered to Mrs. Daggett, who made an
unexpectedly shrewd retort: "I can see. She don't look as if she
cared what anybody thought of her clothes; as if she had so much
she's never minded."

Mrs. Whittle failed to understand. She grunted non-assent. "I don't
see," said she. "Her sleeves are way out of date."

For awhile there was a loud buzz of conversation all over the room.
Then it ceased, for things were happening, amazing things. The
strange young lady was buying and she was paying cash down. Some of
the women examined the bank notes suspiciously and handed them to
their husbands to verify. The girl saw, and flushed, but she
continued. She went from table to table, and she bought everything,
from quilts and hideous drawn-in rugs to frosted cakes. She bought in
the midst of that ominous hush of suspicion. Once she even heard a
woman hiss to another, "She's crazy. She got out of an insane
asylum."

However nobody of all the stunned throng refused to sell. Her first
failure came in the case of a young man. He was Jim Dodge, Fanny's
brother. Jim Dodge was a sort of Ishmael in the village estimation,
and yet he was liked. He was a handsome young fellow with a wild
freedom of carriage. He had worked in the chair factory to support
his mother and sister, before it closed. He haunted the woods, and
made a little by selling skins. He had brought as his contribution to
the fair a beautiful fox skin, and when the young woman essayed to