home to-night, father; I'll set up for you. Good-by again, Lyddy."
She did not kiss the girl again, or touch her hand. Their decent and
sparing adieux had been made in the house. As Miss Maria returned to
the door, the hens, cowering conscience-stricken under the lilacs,
sprang up at sight of her with a screech of guilty alarm, and flew
out over the fence.

"Well, I vow," soliloquized Miss Maria, "from where she set Lyddy must
have seen them pests under the lilacs the whole time, and never said
a word." She pushed the loosened soil into place with the side of her
ample slipper, and then went into the house, where she kindled a fire
in the kitchen stove, and made herself a cup of Japan tea: a variety
of the herb which our country people prefer, apparently because it
affords the same stimulus with none of the pleasure given by the
Chinese leaf.




II.


Lydia and her grandfather reached Boston at four o'clock, and the
old man made a bargain, as he fancied, with an expressman to carry
her baggage across the city to the wharf at which the Aroostook lay.
The expressman civilly offered to take their small parcels without
charge, and deliver them with the trunk and large bag; but as he could
not check them all her grandfather judged it safest not to part with
them, and he and Lydia crowded into the horse-car with their arms and
hands full. The conductor obliged him to give up the largest of these