that one of the little girls whom he used to see playing on the
hill-slope before the cottage had grown up into the young lady whose
name the piano bore. There was quite time enough for this
transformation; it was seven years since Gaites had run up into the
White Mountains for a month's rest after his last term in the Harvard
Law School, and before beginning work in the office of the law firm in
New York where he had got a clerkship, and where he had now a junior
partnership. The little girl was then just ten years old, and now, of
course, the young lady was seventeen, or would be when the piano reached
Lower Merritt, for it was clearly meant to arrive on her birthday; it
was a birthday-present and a surprise. He had always liked the way those
nice people let their children play about barefoot; it would be in
character with them to do a fond, pretty thing like that; and Gaites
smiled for pleasure in it, and then rather blushed in relating the brown
legs of the little girl, as he remembered seeing them in her races over
her father's lawn, to the dignified young lady she had now become.

He amused himself in mentally following the piano on its way to the Sea
Board & Hill Country R. R. freight-depot, which he was quite able to do
from a habit of Boston formed during his four years in the academic
course and his three years in the law-school at Harvard. He knew that it
would cross Boylston into Charles Street, and keep along that level to
Cambridge; then it would turn into McLane Street, and again into Lynde,
by this means avoiding the grades as much as possible, and arriving
through Causeway Street at the long, low freight-depot of the S. B. & H.
C., where it would be the first thing unloaded from the truck. It would
stand indefinitely on the outer platform; and then, when the men in
flat, narrow-peaked silk caps and grease-splotched overalls got round to
it, with an air of as much personal indifference as if they were mere
mechanical agencies, it would be pulled and pushed into the dimness of