tightly, and we stood very still. It was the solemnest time of the year.
III
All this used to happen, as I said, when I was a little girl; but I, too, grew up, as grandfather grew bent and feeble. When he was an old, old man of eighty-five, and when I had been away from Hillsboro several years teaching school, the last of my grandmother's relatives in Newtonville died. I was sent for to decide what should be done with the few family relics, and one Saturday and Sunday I went all through the little old house, looking over the things.
In the garret I came across the moose-skull with one horn. It made me feel queer to think what a part it had played in the development of my grandfather's honorable and tender old soul. There were a few sticks of furniture, some daguerrotypes and silhouettes, and a drawerful of yellow papers. The first I sent home to Hillsboro to grandmother. I took the papers back to the town where I was teaching, to look over them.
Among other things was a quaint old diary of my grandmother's great-aunt, she that was the buxom widow of Jed's story. It was full of homely items of her rustic occupations; what day she had "sett the broune hen," and how much butter was made the first month she had the "party-colored cowe from over the mount'n." I glanced idly at these faded bits of insignificant news, when I was electrified by seeing the following entry:
