marry just as I wished; everybody knows that; the Louds weren’t equal to our family, and everybody knows it, and I have never made any secret as to how I felt, but we have always got along well enough.  The Brewsters are not quarrelsome; they never have been.  There were no words whatever last night to make my granddaughter run away.  Eva and Fanny are all wrong about it.  Ellen has been stolen; I know it as well as if I had seen it.  A strange-looking woman came to the door yesterday afternoon; she was the tallest woman I ever saw, and she took the widest steps; she measured her dress skirt every step she took, and she spoke gruff.  I said then I knew she was a man dressed up.  Ellen was playing out in the yard, and she saw the child as she went out, and I see her stoop and look at her real sharp, and my blood run kind of cold then, and I called Ellen away as quick as I could; and the woman, she turned round and gave me a look that I won’t ever forget as long as I live.  My belief is that that woman was laying in wait when Ellen was going across the yard home from here last night, and she has got her safe somewhere till a reward is offered.  Or maybe she wants to keep her, Ellen is such a beautiful child.  You needn’t put in your papers that my grandchild run away because of quarrelling in our family, because she didn’t.  Eva and Fanny don’t know what they are talking about, they are so wrought up; and, coming from the family they do, they don’t know how to control themselves and show any sense.  I feel it as much as they do, but I have been sitting here all the morning; I know I can’t do anything to help, and I am working a good deal harder, waiting, than they are, rushing from pillar to post and taking on, and I’m doing more good.  I shall be the only one fit to do anything when they find the poor child.  I’ve got blankets warming by the fire, and my tea-kettle on, and I’m going to be the one to depend on when she’s brought home.”  Mrs. Zelotes gave a glance of defiant faith from the window down the road as she spoke.  Then she settled back in her chair and resumed her Bible, and dismissed the tall and forbidding woman whom she had summoned to save the honor of her family resolutely from her conscience.  The editors of The Spy and The Observer had a row of ingratiating photographs of little Ellen from three weeks to seven years of age; and their opinions as to the cause of her disappearance, while fully agreeing in all points of sensationalism with those of young Bemis, of The Star, differed in detail.

Young Bemis read about the mysterious kidnapper, and wondered, and the demand for The Star was chiefly among the immediate neighbors of the Brewsters.  Both The Observer and The Spy doubled their circulation in one day, and every face on the night cars was hidden behind poor little Ellen’s baby countenances and the fairy-story of the witch-woman who had lured her away.  Mothers kept their children