Tatham's passenger list, as the ricketty stage passed
with the side curtains up, and the number of trunks
and bags, and the size of them, all indicative of
where they were bound and for how long; details
of village life--no one of which concerned her in the
least--being matters of profound interest to Miss
Gossaway.

These several discoveries she shared daily with
a faded old mother who sat huddled up in a rocking-
chair by the stove, winter and summer, whether it
had any fire in it or not.

Uncle Ephraim Tipple, in his outspoken way,
always referred to these two gossips as the "spiders."
"When the thin one has sucked the life out of you,"
he would say with a laugh, "she passes you on to her
old mother, who sits doubled up inside the web,
and when she gets done munching there isn't anything
left but your hide and bones."

It was but one of Uncle Ephraim's jokes. The
mother was only a forlorn, half-alive old woman
who dozed in her chair by the hour--the relict of a
fisherman who had gone to sea in his yawl some
twenty years before and who had never come back.
The daughter, with the courage of youth, had then
stepped into the gap and had alone made the
fight for bread. Gradually, as the years went
by the roses in her cheeks--never too fresh at any