unerringly into a hollow, there, where she stooped and filled her hands
with tansy, pulling it up in great bunches, and pressing it eagerly to
her face.

"Seventy-four year ago!" she told the unseen listener of the night,
with the same wonder in her voice. "Sir laid dead, an' they sent me
down here to pick tansy to put round him. Seventy-four year ago!"

Still holding it; she rose, and went through the bars into the dewy
lane. Down the wandering path, trodden daily by the cows, she walked,
and came out in the broad pasture, irregular with its little hillocks,
where, as she had been told from her babyhood, the Indians used to
plant their corn. She entered the woods by a cart-path hidden from the
moon, and went on with a light step, gathering a bit of green here and
there,--now hemlock, now a needle from the sticky pine,--and inhaling
its balsam on her hands. A sharp descent, and she had reached the spot
where the brook ran fast, and where lay "Peggy's b'ilin' spring," named
for a great-aunt she had never seen, but whose gold beads she had
inherited, and who had consequently seemed to her a person of opulence
and ease.

"I wish't I'd brought a cup," she said. "There ain't no such water
within twenty mile."

She crouched beside the little black pool, where the moon glinted in
mysterious, wavering, symbols to beckon the gaze upward, and, making a
cup of her hand, drank eagerly. There was a sound near-by, as if some
wood creature were stirring; she thought she heard a fox barking in the
distance. Yet she was really conscious only of the wonder of time, the
solemn record of the fleeting years.