HE breezes that blew over Mandy's garden stirred among vegetables and flow-" ers that lifted their heads in close proximity, no plant more difficult to classify than Mandy herself. She might have been described as a hybrid, not placed in the great human herbarium, so contradictory were her traits. Tall and straight and thin, in her greenish-gray print gown, topped off with a bright pink sun-bonnet, she looked not unlike one of the stalks of her own hollyhocks when she stood among them. She was spare and angular within as well as without. Life had made her so. If her character was hard and unyielding, however, it was also soft in spots. These inconsistencies were for the most part unsuspected by her neighbors, but their treacherous presence was known and deplored by Mandy herself. Careful and discriminating in her sparing charities, she was often imposed upon by the most egregious beggars, because the appeal in some occult way reached down and touched the undercurrent of love and romance beneath her prosaic exterior.

Bending over the weeds, she had a habit of fixing her thoughts on the backward vista of her fifty years. One by one, as she pulled and piled, she would cast up the reckoning against fate, of her disappointments and burdens and defeated aims. Such an arraignment of vanished years is the surest way to take all sweetness out of those that remain, and Mandy with her own hand was pouring bitterness into the cup of her approaching age. Often when birds were piping and calling through the dewy mornings, and all the little garden world was a misty

fairyland of beauty and fragrance, the mistress, lonely and silent, went bending over the mould, digging up with the plantain and chickweed and henbane the accumulated pain of her past.

As far back as she could remember, life had granted her ironical substitutions for her longings and prayers. All along the way she could see only stones for the bread her hunger had craved, and now an uncompanioned loneliness in which to live it over again. She saw herself a little child in a gingham pinafore, trudging to school, with wild dreams in her head of some day teaching in the district. Then she followed that same girl with ambitions laid aside, toiling in a factory to help support an invalid mother, and brothers and sisters left fatherless. She recalled with peculiar poignancy the renouncing of her matrimonial visions at the old call of duty, and she said to herself that Eben Plympton had been a steady beau, not to be lightly discarded. The sadness of his face and the shine of his dark hair where it was slicked forward above his ears were as plain to her now when she shut her eyes as if the thirty years between her and the parting over the gate were but a day. The gate still swung there in the picket fence unchanged, barring a few added slats and a new hinge and latch-she could see it if she chose to rise up and turn around; and here was she almost an old woman, while Eben, she had heard, lay beneath the sod of a western prairie. She saw her hopes and dreams, transferred to those younger ones, fade and disappear as the children died, and at last there was only the mother left. A few years more slipped away, and then Mandy and the old house were alone.

The steady rise in her factory positions and the increasing salary had

been no compensation for all the sacrifice in vain. Day after day through these lonely latter years she chewed her cud of resentment against fate-she had long since renounced any belief in Providence. She felt that she had been tricked and cheated, had been led by tortuous paths to a height of financial prosperity she had never craved, where with her dearly bought leisure she had ample time to look down over the lovely land of peace and love and fireside comradeship where she would fain have dwelt. To have kept the old home, to have added to the garden, and put the old-fashioned house in repair, to have saved enough money to live in frugal prosperity, was nothing to her compared with the loss. and loneliness and lovelessness of her life. She felt that she had somehow deserved better.

The neighbors used sometimes to suggest, by vague hints, possible expedients; but Mandy's unresponsive coldness repelled any advance. "Take a child to bring up, indeed!" she would sniff. "Have it spend what I've got together, and like as not abuse or disgrace me in my old age!"

Nobody ever got nearer than hint or innuendo on this subject except the old doctor who had won in Mandy's long family experience with illness and suffering a privileged place. Sometimes he drew up beside the fence and diverted her attention for a while from her introspective weedings. So it was one morning in early summer, when the pink sun-bonnet was closing her ears and eyes to all the influences of the blossoming garden. She She rose when she heard the well-known crack of his whip to call her.

"Come now, shove back that bonnet of yours and let in a little sun and air!" Mandy rose up stiffly and walked over to the fence. The doctor's eyes travelled past her down a spick and span white pebbled path bordered with freshly trimmed box, to where a family of kittens were rioting and balancing upon an old arbor.

"Mrs. McManus has a new baby,"

he volunteered, "and that makes ten. She'd be glad to find a home for the little one of six that I was speaking to you about last week-a wonderfully clever and taking little kid, Mandy."

Mandy took off her bonnet as she leaned one arm along the pickets, revealing a mass of waving gray hair which was gathered in a tight coil at the crown of her shapely head. She had still a fine complexion, which gave her a more youthful look than belonged to her years. With her long straight nose and level brows she had a severe expression until she disclosed her eyes, and then you realized the presence of feeling and fire beneath the icy surface.

"That mare's off hind foot," she said with studied irrelevance, "is swelled some around the fetlock. You'd better have it soaked in warm water to-night."

The doctor laughed, snapping his long whip over the fence at the kittens.

"Pshaw, what's the use?" he remonstrated. "You'd get lots of comfort out of it, if you'd only try it. Why, two nice young ones tumbling round. this old garden'd beat all the kittens and other live stock you've got, put together."

"There ain't any more to be said on that subject," said Mandy turning away from the fence, "as I've told you often enough before. If I can't have children of my own, I don't propose to run any risks bringing up other people's."

But the doctor called her back. "I've got one waiting for you all the same. She's up at the poorhouse, and a regular wonder of a baby; you'll like her, I'm sure!"

Mandy put on her bonnet and walked away, turning it toward him. like a funnel over her shoulder as she announced, "I guess that baby will do some tall waiting!"

"She's waited quite some already," the doctor called after her as he drove off; "she's eighty-six years old!"

All that day, as she hoed among the beans and the cabbages, Mandy knew

that the doctor had hit upon one of her treacherous soft spots. Old age and feebleness were the inherited memories of her mother. The morrow's setting sun looked into the living room on the deed accomplished.

Near the stove sat a tiny shrivelled old woman, whose white hair above her wrinkles and the cotton kerchief folded across her shoulders were laid in angles so alike that her face had the effect of being set in a white frame with opposite points above and below. She wore a ruffled cap tied snugly under her chin, and her whole small person expressed scrupulous if shabby neatness. Everything about her seemed old but her eyes, and they were of that deep blue which we only expect to see in children's eyes. They gave her a singularly childlike expression, and when she smiled her very toothlessness completed the illusion. She looked like an octogenarian baby.

"What shall I call you?" said Mandy, as she laid aside the old shawl and the swaddling wraps which had been wound about the old lady's head. "Everybody calls me 'Grammer Great," she said with a sweet little deprecatory glance toward Mandy, who was now bustling about her preparations for tea; and then she added, as if to propitiate this half terrible good genius of her changing fortunes, "Couldn't I help any?"

Mandy was laying the cloth over the little mahogany table between the windows, and she loomed up tall where she stood in the low-ceiled room. She looked sharply at the wee figure half crouching in the big rocker where her mother had sat fading away for so many years. Something in the frightened look of the wrinkled face stirred her deeply, and swiftly crossing the space between them she bent over and kissed the old woman's cheek. It was nearly ten years since she had kissed anybody.

"It's a lot of help just to have you there in that chair where I can look at you," she said.

Grammer Great gave a little croon

that was like an inward laugh, and settled back with her feet on the cricket. This was solid comfort indeed. To think of having someone to do for you who actually liked it! She asked no questions about Mandy's intentions; she had asked none about the descent upon the poorhouse and her capture. The poor soul had been accustomed for so many uncomplaining years to be handed on from one relative to another like a bundle of old clothes, that with the power to direct it she had lost all interest in the disposition of her person. She watched the setting of the table with wondering absorption. She saw two blue cups and saucers of an old, old fashion, two blue plates whose pattern—the bridge, the Chinese junk and all-resurrected the housekeeping of her past, and napkins, actually napkins, for her who had been eating these many months out of tin basins belonging to the town! Grammer Great laughed delightedly with a high cackle like a bantam's.

"I guess you won't keep me for a very long visit," she said, "you make sich company of me!"

"Tain't a visit," Mandy answered with decision, from the cupboard where she was reaching up for the teapot. "You've come to stay."

When she set the pot on the stove and poured into it the boiling water, she saw that the old lady's eyes were tight shut, but down a winding furrow of her face was trickling a telltale tear.

From that time forward Grammer Great made no ado about her benefits, but enjoyed every breath she drew with a fervor which told its own eloquent story of long privation and abuse. She fairly basked in her late found prosperity, and "warmed both. hands at the fire of life" with renewing vigor. She attached herself to Mandy's person in a way which was at times inconvenient; and whether Mandy sewed or swept or weeded her garden there was Grammer Great in close proximity, often holding fast to Mandy's skirt to steady her tottering footsteps. She loved to think she was

useful, so with infinite patience and ingenuity Mandy got into the way of setting her little tasks to imitate her own, as she would have done for a child. She bought a child's broom, and while she was sweeping, Granimer Great was allowed to think the futile brushing she did with that toy from her chair was of great value in the result. When Mandy made bread or pie or cake in the out kitchen-where the real work always went on-there must Grammer Great be seated by the table and mould a loaf, or trim the edges of the pies, or make a feint at beating eggs. When Mandy fed the chickens, Grammer Great stirred the meal and called "Kip, kip," in her feeble cracked voice. When Mandy weeded, she put an easy chair at the end of the row, and there sat Grammer Great with a piece of magic knitting which Mandy was accustomed to rip and do over again each night when her baby had been tucked into bed at an early hour.

"There," the dear old soul would quaver, as she settled back to luxurious contentment among the high banked pillows, "now ain't this nice! I've never hed enough pillows under my head before. My, ain't we hed a busy day, Mandy, and I've got a good piece done on my stocking too!" Then Mandy would rip down to where the dropped stitches began and knit up again a day's allowance.

So they went on together, mutually serving each other's needs. If Mandy gave material attention of the most exacting nature, she also received a hundredfold in spiritual benefit. Grammer Great was like the finest of old wine, out of which all noxious qualities had long since been fermented, leaving it rich and sweet, of a divine and life-giving flavor. There was in her no capability of blame or complaint. Her troubles seemed to her quite in the way of the world and no more than her share of the universal burden. To be sure, comparatively few old women came upon the town, but perhaps the others had afflictions

as severe. Everybody, she was sure, meant kindly by her, and many times, to Mandy's intense inward indignation, she made excuses for the children and grandchildren who had been so heartless.

"It must be thirty year," she said one day as she was helping peel apples to dry, "since we lost the farm, trying to help 'Zekiel, my son. Then he died, and me bein' a widder, I divided up my things and took to visitin' round 'mongst my daughters."

"Visitin'?" said Mandy sharply as she cut up an apple with swift slicings. "I should think one of them would have kept you on to live!"

"Oh, they'd 'a' been glad to," Grammer Great hastened to explain, "but they all wanted me then to help, an' I took 'em by turns. You see," she went on with a sort of complacency, "I've always ben handy to work, and they bein' all dretful poor was anxious to git me. The real hard thing about it was losin' 'Zekiel's little Ebenezer. 'Zekiel'd always lived home, an' after he died his wife moved out west to where her folks lived and took 'Zekiel's little Ebenezer along with her."

"Was he a very little boy then?" asked Mandy gently, picturing to herself a chubby figure in bare legs and petticoats.

"No," said Grammer Great deliberately, as she rested her wrists on the edge of the pan in her lap, "he wa'n't so very young neither, but I'd always called him 'little Ebenezer and I expect I always shall. He must have been dead though this good while, er he'd sure hev hunted me up. always sot great store by me, somehow." She had an expression of patient resignation which was very pathetic to see.

He

"Why didn't he write to you then, and send you money?" said Mandy, with the air of a judge sitting on the matter of Ebenezer's delinquency and fully prepared to charge the jury against the accused.

"I don't know," resumed Grammer Great sadly; and then she brightened