“A potato in your pocket!” exclaimed Dame Hartley.  “Reuel Slocum! what do you mean?”

“Sounds curus, don’t it?” returned Mr. Slocum.  “But it’s a fact that it’s a great cure for rheumatiz.  A grea-at cure!  Why, there’s Barzillay Smith, over to Peat’s Corner, has kerried a potato in his pocket for five years,—­not the same potato, y’ know; changes ’em when they begin to sprout,—­and he hesn’t hed a touch o’ rheumatism all that time.  Not a touch! tol’ me so himself.”

“Had he ever hed it before?” asked Dame Hartley.

“I d’no as he hed,” said Mr. Slocum, “But his father hed; an’ his granf’ther before him.  So ye see—­”

But here Hilda uttered a long sigh of weariness and impatience; and Dame Hartley, with a penitent glance at her, bade good-morning to the victim of rheumatism, gave old Nancy a smart slap with the reins, and drove off down the wood-road.

“My dear child,” she said to Hilda as they jogged along, “I ought not to have kept you waiting so long, and you tired with your ride in the cars.  But Reuel Slocum lives all alone here, and he does enjoy a little chat with an old neighbor more than most folks; so I hope you’ll excuse me.”

“It is of no consequence, thank you,” murmured Hildegarde, with cold civility.  She did not like to be called “my dear child,” to begin with; and besides, she was very weary and heartsick, and altogether miserable.  But she tried to listen, as the good woman continued to talk in a cheery, comfortable tone, telling her how fond she had always been of “Miss Mildred,” as she called Mrs. Graham, and how she had the care of her till she was almost a woman grown, and never would have left her then if Jacob Hartley hadn’t got out of patience.

“And to think how you’ve grown, Hilda dear!  You don’t remember it, of course, but this isn’t the first time you have been at Hartley’s Glen.  A sweet baby you were, just toddling about on the prettiest little feet I ever saw, when your mamma brought you out here to spend a month with old Nurse Lucy.  And your father came out every week, whenever he could get away from his business.  What a fine man he is, to be sure!  And he and my husband had rare times, shooting over the meadows, and fishing, and the like.”

They were still in the wood-road, now jolting along over ridges and hummocks, now ploughing through stretches of soft, sandy soil.  Above and on either side, the great trees interlaced their branches, sometimes letting them droop till they brushed against Hilda’s cheek, sometimes lifting them to give her a glimpse of cool vistas of dusky green, shade within shade,—­moss-grown hollows, where the St. John’s-wort showed its tarnished gold, and white Indian pipe gleamed like silver along the ground; or stony beds over which, in the time of the spring rains, little brown brooks ran foaming and bubbling down through the woods.  The air was filled with the faint cool smell of ferns,