her husband, and the three lank boys with him were her sons; that the
children whose faces watched them through the writhing window panes were
her two little girls; that the urchin who stood shyly twisted, all but
his white head and sunburned face, into her dress and glanced at them
with a mocking blue eye, was her youngest, and that he was three years
old. With like coldness of voice and face, she assented to their
conjecture that the space walled off in the farther corner of the orchard
was the family burial ground; and she said, with no more feeling that the
ladies could see than she had shown concerning the other facts, that the
graves they saw were those of her husband's family and of the children
she had lost there had been ten children, and she had lost four. She did
not visibly shrink from the pursuit of the sympathy which expressed
itself in curiosity as to the sickness they had died of; the ladies left
her with the belief that they had met a character, and she remained with
the conviction, briefly imparted to her husband, that they were tonguey.

The summer folks came more and more, every year, with little variance in
the impression on either side. When they told her that her maple sugar
would sell better if the cake had an image of Lion's Head stamped on it,
she answered that she got enough of Lion's Head without wanting to see it
on all the sugar she made. But the next year the cakes bore a rude effigy
of Lion's Head, and she said that one of her boys had cut the stamp out
with his knife; she now charged five cents a cake for the sugar, but her
manner remained the same. It did not change when the excursionists drove
away, and the deep silence native to the place fell after their chatter.
When a cock crew, or a cow lowed, or a horse neighed, or one of the boys
shouted to the cattle, an echo retorted from the granite base of Lion's
Head, and then she had all the noise she wanted, or, at any rate, all the
noise there was most of the time. Now and then a wagon passed on the
stony road by the brook in the valley, and sent up its clatter to the