“Old Aunt Peet’s passed away,” he informed me briskly.  “She had a shock, and went right off sudden yisterday fore-noon.  I’m about now tendin’ to the funeral ’rangements.  She’s be’n extry smart, they say, all winter,—­out to meetin’ last Sabbath; never enjoyed herself so complete as she has this past month.  She’d be’n a very hard-workin’ woman.  Her folks was glad to have her there, and give her every attention.  The place here never was good for nothin’.  The old gen’leman,—­uncle, you know,—­he wore hisself out tryin’ to make a livin’ off from it.”

There was an ostentatious sympathy and half-suppressed excitement from bad news which were quite lost upon us, and we did not linger to hear much more.  It seemed to me as if I had known Mrs. Peet better than any one else had known her.  I had counted upon seeing her again, and hearing her own account of Shrewsbury life, its pleasures and its limitations.  I wondered what had become of the cat and the contents of the faded bundle-handkerchief.

* * * * *

The White Rose Road

Being a New Englander, it is natural that I should first speak about the weather.  Only the middle of June, the green fields, and blue sky, and bright sun, with a touch of northern mountain wind blowing straight toward the sea, could make such a day, and that is all one can say about it.  We were driving seaward through a part of the country which has been least changed in the last thirty years,—­among farms which have been won from swampy lowland, and rocky, stump-buttressed hillsides:  where the forests wall in the fields, and send their outposts year by year farther into the pastures.  There is a year or two in the history of these pastures before they have arrived at the dignity of being called woodland, and yet are too much shaded and overgrown by young trees to give proper pasturage, when they made delightful harbors for the small wild creatures which yet remain, and for wild flowers and berries.  Here you send an astonished rabbit scurrying to his burrow, and there you startle yourself with a partridge, who seems to get the best of the encounter.  Sometimes you see a hen partridge and her brood of chickens crossing your path with an air of comfortable door-yard security.  As you drive along the narrow, grassy road, you see many charming sights and delightful nooks on either hand, where the young trees spring out of a close-cropped turf that carpets the ground like velvet.  Toward the east and the quaint fishing village of Ogunquit, I find the most delightful woodland roads.  There is little left of the large timber which once filled the region, but much young growth, and there are hundreds of acres of cleared land and pasture-ground where the forests are springing fast and covering the country once more, as if they had no idea of losing in their war with civilization and the intruding white settler.  The pine woods and the Indians seem to be next of kin, and the former