carriage steps and ran to the well.

It was like Sunday all over the farm, only the cattle were not
straying over the fields. The house was shut up, its new inhabitants
not having arrived. Some neighbor women had come to bid the family
good-bye again, though it was so early that the garden lay in heavy
dew. These good friends stood around the carriage; one of them held
the front-door key in trust for the new purchaser. They all called
the straight old lady who held the lines grandma Padgett. She was
grandma Padgett to the entire neighborhood, and they shook their
heads sorrowfully in remembering that her blue spectacles, her
ancient Leghorn bonnet, her Quaker shoulder cape and decided face
might be vanishing from them forever.

"You'll come back to Ohio," said one neighbor. "The wild Western
prairie country won't suit you at all."

"I'm not denying," returned grandma Padgett, "that I could end my
days in peace on the farm here; but son Tip can do very little here,
and he can do well out there. I've lost my entire family except son
Tip and the baby of all, you know. And it's not my wish to be
separated from son Tip in my declining years."

The neighbors murmured that they knew, and one of them inquired as
she had often inquired before, at what precise point grandma
Padgett's son was to meet the party; and she replied as if giving new
information, that it was at the Illinois State line.

"You'll have pretty weather," said another woman, squinting-in the
early sun.