curiosities, specimens of conch shells and fine coral which they
had brought home from their voyages in lumber-laden ships. Mrs.
Todd had told me all our neighbor's history. They had been girls
together, and, to use her own phrase, had "both seen trouble till
they knew the best and worst on 't." I could see the sorrowful,
large figure of Mrs. Todd as I stood at the window. She made a
break in the procession by walking slowly and keeping the after-
part of it back. She held a handkerchief to her eyes, and I knew,
with a pang of sympathy, that hers was not affected grief.

Beside her, after much difficulty, I recognized the one
strange and unrelated person in all the company, an old man who had
always been mysterious to me. I could see his thin, bending
figure. He wore a narrow, long-tailed coat and walked with a
stick, and had the same "cant to leeward" as the wind-bent trees on
the height above.

This was Captain Littlepage, whom I had seen only once or
twice before, sitting pale and old behind a closed window; never
out of doors until now. Mrs. Todd always shook her head gravely
when I asked a question, and said that he wasn't what he had been
once, and seemed to class him with her other secrets. He might
have belonged with a simple which grew in a certain slug-haunted
corner of the garden, whose use she could never be betrayed
into telling me, though I saw her cutting the tops by moonlight
once, as if it were a charm, and not a medicine, like the great
fading bloodroot leaves.

I could see that she was trying to keep pace with the old
captain's lighter steps. He looked like an aged grasshopper of