Kate asked if she would be kind enough to lend us a tumbler (for ours was in the basket, which was given into Tommy’s charge).  We were thirsty, and would like to go back to the spring and get some water.

“Yes, dear,” said Mrs. Bonny, “I’ve got a glass, if it’s so’s I can find it.”  And she pulled a chair under the little cupboard over the fireplace, mounted it, and opened the door.  Several things fell out at her, and after taking a careful survey she went in, head and shoulders, until I thought that she would disappear altogether; but soon she came back, and reaching in took out one treasure after another, putting them on the mantel-piece or dropping them on the floor.  There were some bunches of dried herbs, a tin horn, a lump of tallow in a broken plate, a newspaper, and an old boot, with a number of turkey-wings tied together, several bottles, and a steel trap, and finally, such a tumbler! which she produced with triumph, before stepping down.  She poured out of it on the table a mixture of old buttons and squash-seeds, beside a lump of beeswax which she said she had lost, and now pocketed with satisfaction.  She wiped the tumbler on her apron and handed it to Kate, but we were not so thirsty as we had been, though we thanked her and went down to the spring, coming back as soon as possible, for we could not lose a bit of the conversation.

There was a beautiful view from the doorstep, and we stopped a minute there.  “Real sightly, ain’t it?” said Mrs. Bonny.  “But you ought to be here and look across the woods some morning just at sun-up.  Why, the sky is all yaller and red, and them low lands topped with fog!  Yes, it’s nice weather, good growin’ weather, this week.  Corn and all the rest of the trade looks first-rate.  I call it a forrard season.  It’s just such weather as we read of, ain’t it?”

“I don’t remember where, just at this moment,” said Mr. Lorimer.

“Why, in the almanac, bless ye!” said she, with a tone of pity in her grum voice; could it be possible he didn’t know,—­the Deephaven minister!

We asked her to come and see us.  She said she had always thought she’d get a chance some time to see Miss Katharine Brandon’s house.  She should be pleased to call, and she didn’t know but she should be down to the shore before very long.  She was ’shamed to look so shif’less that day, but she had some good clothes in a chist in the bedroom, and a boughten bonnet with a good cypress veil, which she had when “he” died.  She calculated they would do, though they might be old-fashioned, some.  She seemed greatly pleased at Mr. Lorimer’s having taken the trouble to come to see her.  All those people had a great reverence for “the minister.”  We were urged to come again in “rosbry” time, which was near at hand, and she gave us messages for some of her old customers and acquaintances.  “I believe some of those old creatur’s will never die,” said she; “why, they’re getting to be ter’ble old, ain’t they,