To my great pleasure, my fellow-traveler now began to forget her own troubles in looking about her.  She was an alert, quickly interested old soul, and this was a bit of neutral ground between the farm and Shrewsbury, where she was unattached and irresponsible.  She had lived through the last tragic moments of her old life, and felt a certain relief, and Shrewsbury might be as far away as the other side of the Rocky Mountains for all the consciousness she had of its real existence.  She was simply a traveler for the time being, and began to comment, with delicious phrases and shrewd understanding of human nature, on two or three persons near us who attracted her attention.

“Where do you s’pose they be all goin’?” she asked contemptuously.  “There ain’t none on ’em but what looks kind o’ respectable.  I’ll warrant they’ve left work to home they’d ought to be doin’.  I knowed, if ever I stopped to think, that cars was hived full o’ folks, an’ wa’n’t run to an’ fro for nothin’; but these can’t be quite up to the average, be they?  Some on ’em’s real thrif’less; guess they’ve be’n shoved out o’ the last place, an’ goin’ to try the next one,—­like me, I suppose you’ll want to say!  Jest see that flauntin’ old creatur’ that looks like a stopped clock.  There! everybody can’t be o’ one goodness, even preachers.”

I was glad to have Mrs. Peet amused, and we were as cheerful as we could be for a few minutes.  She said earnestly that she hoped to be forgiven for such talk, but there were some kinds of folks in the cars that she never had seen before.  But when the conductor came to take her ticket she relapsed into her first state of mind, and was at a loss.

“You’ll have to look after me, dear, when we get to Shrewsbury,” she said, after we had spent some distracted moments in hunting for the ticket, and the cat had almost escaped from the basket, and the bundle-handkerchief had become untied and all its miscellaneous contents scattered about our laps and the floor.  It was a touching collection of the last odds and ends of Mrs. Peet’s housekeeping:  some battered books, and singed holders for flatirons, and the faded little shoulder shawl that I had seen her wear many a day about her bent shoulders.  There were her old tin match-box spilling all its matches, and a goose-wing for brushing up ashes, and her much-thumbed Leavitt’s Almanac.  It was most pathetic to see these poor trifles out of their places.  At last the ticket was found in her left-hand woolen glove, where her stiff, work-worn hand had grown used to the feeling of it.

“I shouldn’t wonder, now, if I come to like living over to Shrewsbury first-rate,” she insisted, turning to me with a hopeful, eager look to see if I differed.  “You see’t won’t be so tough for me as if I hadn’t always felt it lurking within me to go off some day or ‘nother an’ see how other folks did things.  I do’ know but what the Winn gals have laid up somethin’ sufficient for us to