“But it’s a fine day,” she protested, “and I must just go and see how that pink hawthorn is doing. It looked to me over-pruned.” Then she hesitated. “Is everyone there, waiting? Shall I hold up the meeting?”

“All the time in the world,” Jem said. “You know how they are. Christina is the only living soul in the town who has a sense of time.”

“I felt responsible. After all, I was bringing a very important person.”

“Nonsense.” Miss Tuttle laughed again. “It’s quite absurd to have asked me to participate”—and she was off to examine the hawthorn, a particular friend, as she had planted it in memory of a nephew killed in World War II.

Jem, Old Pete, and Christina watched her go.

“She doesn’t miss a trick, does she?”

“It’s the old stock,” Old Pete said. “Why, her grand-pappy climbed Monadnock when he was eighty. You can’t get those Tuttles down. They live forever and keep their wits, which is more than can be said for some of us.”

Christina was always surprised, when she had a chance to hear Old Pete talk, at how well-spoken he was. In fact, one of the curious things about the town was that the uneducated of Pete’s age spoke beautiful English—far better than her own grandchildren ever had. Yet she didn’t suppose Pete had had more than six winters’ schooling, if that.

“Who was the teacher here, Pete, when you went to school?”

“General Morse’s daughter,” he said proudly. “It was a fine school in her day—spelling bees, orations; we learned poetry by heart. First thing she did was have us build a bookcase and bring over her books to put in it.”

It was a pity, Christina thought, that he was interrupted in these reflections by the arrival of Miss Plummer, the town librarian, for she would have liked to hear more about Miss Morse, who had come to teach for a year or two in the village instead of coming out in Boston, for reasons that remained mysterious.

But Miss Plummer, brisk, domineering, must be greeted now, and Jim Heald; and dear Jane led back from her botanical interests. Only the Websters were still to come.

“Jem”—she heard Miss Plummer’s rather loud voice from inside—“when are you going to get this meeting going?”

It made a counterpoint to Old Pete’s rendering of a stanza of Whittier’s that had floated back into his mind, no doubt at the mention of Miss Morse:

“‘The rigor of a frozen clime,

The harshness of an untaught ear,

The jarring words of one whose rhyme

Beat often Labor’s hurried time,

Or Duty’s rugged march through storm and strife, are here,’”

he intoned, while Jim Heald nodded.