They walked on in aggrieved silence.  Peggy Bond trembled with excitement, but her companion’s firm grasp never wavered, and so they came to the narrow, gravelly margin and stood still.  Peggy tried in vain to see the glittering water and the pond-lilies that starred it; she knew that they must be there; once, years ago, she had caught fleeting glimpses of them, and she never forgot what she had once seen.  The clear blue sky overhead, the dark pine-woods beyond the pond, were all clearly pictured in her mind.  “Can’t you see nothin’?” she faltered; “I believe I’m wuss’n upsighted this day.  I’m going to be blind.”

“No,” said Lavina Dow solemnly; “no, there ain’t nothin’ whatever, Peggy.  I hope to mercy she ain’t”—­

“Why, whoever’d expected to find you ’way out here!” exclaimed a brisk and cheerful voice.  There stood Betsey Lane herself, close behind them, having just emerged from a thicket of alders that grew close by.  She was following the short way homeward from the railroad.

“Why, what’s the matter, Mis’ Dow?  You ain’t overdoin’, be ye? an’ Peggy’s all of a flutter.  What in the name o’ natur’ ails ye?”

“There ain’t nothin’ the matter, as I knows on,” responded the leader of this fruitless expedition.  “We only thought we’d take a stroll this pleasant mornin’,” she added, with sublime self-possession.  “Where’ve you be’n, Betsey Lane?”

“To Pheladelphy, ma’am,” said Betsey, looking quite young and gay, and wearing a townish and unfamiliar air that upheld her words.  “All ought to go that can; why, you feel’s if you’d be’n all round the world.  I guess I’ve got enough to think of and tell ye for the rest o’ my days.  I’ve always wanted to go somewheres.  I wish you’d be’n there, I do so.  I’ve talked with folks from Chiny an’ the back o’ Pennsylvany; and I see folks way from Australy that ‘peared as well as anybody; an’ I see how they made spool cotton, an’ sights o’ other things; an’ I spoke with a doctor that lives down to the beach in the summer, an’ he offered to come up ‘long in the first of August, an’ see what he can do for Peggy’s eyesight.  There was di’monds there as big as pigeon’s eggs; an’ I met with Mis’ Abby Fletcher from South Byfleet depot; an’ there was hogs there that weighed risin’ thirteen hunderd”—­

“I want to know,” said Mrs. Lavina Dow and Peggy Bond, together.

“Well, ’twas a great exper’ence for a person,” added Lavina, turning ponderously, in spite of herself, to give a last wistful look at the smiling waters of the pond.

“I don’t know how soon I be goin’ to settle down,” proclaimed the rustic sister of Sindbad.  “What’s for the good o’ one’s for the good of all.  You just wait till we’re setting together up in the old shed chamber!  You know, my dear Mis’ Katy Strafford give me a han’some present o’ money that day she come to see me; and I’d be’n a-dreamin’ by night an’ day o’ seein’ that Centennial; and when I come to think on’t I felt sure somebody