lending old Fashion to haul her, which was a great deal more
than lending herself; and the doctor treated her in New York for three months

without any charge, till, I believe, the child got better.
Old maids do not mind giving people trouble.

She hung on at the old place as long as she could, but it had to be sold,
and finally she had to leave it; though, I believe, even after it was sold

she tried boarding for a while with Scroggs, the former tenant,
who had bought it. He treated her so badly that finally she had to leave,

and boarded around. I believe the real cause was she caught him ploughing
with old Fashion.

After that I do not know exactly what she did. I heard that though
the parish was vacant she had a Sunday-school at the old church,

and so kept the church open; and that she used to play the wheezy old organ
and teach the poor children the chants; but as they grew up they all joined

another Church; they had a new organ there. I do not know just how
she got on. I was surprised to hear finally that she was dead --

had been dead since Christmas. It had never occurred to me
that she would die. She had been dying so long that I had almost come

to regard her as immortal, and as a necessary part of the old county
and its associations.

I fell in some time afterwards with a young doctor from the old county,
who, I found, had attended her, and I made some inquiries about her.

He told me that she died Christmas night. She came to his house
on her old mare, in the rain and snow the night before, to get him to go

to see someone, some "friend" of hers who was sick. He said she had more
sick friends than anyone he ever knew; he told her that he was sick himself

and could not go; but she was so importunate that he promised to go
next morning (she was always very worrying). He said she was wet

and shivering then (she never had any idea about really protecting herself),
and that she appeared to have a wretched cold. She had been riding all day

seeing about a Christmas-tree for the poor children. He urged her to stop
and spend the night, but she insisted that she must go on, though it was

nearly dark and raining hard, and the roads would have mired a cat
(she was always self-willed). Next day he went to see the sick woman,

and when he arrived he found her in one bed and Cousin Fanny in another,
in the same room. When he had examined the patient, he turned and

asked Cousin Fanny what was the matter with her. "Oh, just a little cold,
a little trouble in the chest, as Theodore Hook said," she replied.

"But I know how to doctor myself." Something about her voice struck him.
He went over to her and looked at her, and found her suffering from

acute pneumonia. He at once set to work on her. He took the other patient
up in his arms and carried her into another room, where he told her that

Cousin Fanny was a desperately ill woman. "She was actually dying then, sir,"
he said to me, "and she died that night. When she arrived at the place

the night before, which was not until after nine o'clock,
she had gone to the stable herself to put up her old mare,

or rather to see that she was fed -- she always did that --
so when she got into the house she was wet and chilled through,

and she had to go to bed. She must have had on wet clothes," he said.
I asked him if she knew she was going to die. He said he did not think

she did; that he did not tell her, and she talked about nothing
except her Christmas-tree and the people she wanted to see. He heard her

praying in the night, "and, by the way," he said, "she mentioned you.
She shortly became rather delirious, and wandered a good deal,

talking of things that must have happened when she was young;
spoke of going to see her mother somewhere. The last thing she ever said

was something about fashion, which," he said, "showed how ingrained
is vanity in the female mind." The doctor knows something of human nature.

He concluded what he had to say with, "She was in some respects
a very remarkable woman -- if she had not been an old maid.

I do not suppose that she ever drew a well breath in her life.
Not that I think old maids cannot be very acceptable women," he apologized.

"They are sometimes very useful." The doctor was a rather enlightened man.
Some of her relatives got there in time for the funeral, and a good many

of the poor people came; and she was carried in a little old spring wagon,
drawn by Fashion, through the snow, to the old home place,

where Scroggs very kindly let them dig the grave, and was buried there
in the old graveyard in the garden, in a vacant space just beside her mother,

with the children around her. I really miss her a great deal.
The other boys say they do the same. I suppose it is the trouble

she used to give us.
The old set are all doing well. Doug is a professor.

He says the word "spinster" gave him a twist to philology.
Old Blinky is in Paris. He had a picture in the salon last year,

an autumn landscape, called "Le Cote du Bois". I believe
the translation of that is "The Woodside". His coloring is said to be

nature itself. To think of old Blinky being a great artist!
Little Kitty is now a big girl, and is doing finely at school.

I have told her she must not be an old maid. Joe is a preacher
with a church in the purlieus of a large city. I was there not long ago.

He had a choral service. The Gregorian music carried me back to old times.
He preached on the text, "I was sick, and ye visited me." It was such

a fine sermon, and he had such a large congregation, that I asked
why he did not go to a finer church. He said he was "carrying soup

to Mrs. Ronquist." By the way, his organist was a splendid musician.
She introduced herself to me. It was Scroggs's daughter. She is married,

and can walk as well as I can. She had a little girl with her that I think
she called "Fanny". I do not think that was Mrs. Scroggs's name.

Frank is now a doctor, or rather a surgeon, in the same city with Joe,
and becoming very distinguished. The other day he performed

a great operation, saving a woman's life, which was in all the papers.
He said to an interviewer that he became a surgeon from dressing a sore

on an old mare's back. I wonder what he was talking about?
He is about to start a woman's hospital for poor women.

Cousin Fanny would have been glad of that; she was always proud of Frank.
She would as likely as not have quoted that verse from Tennyson's song

about the echoes. She sleeps now under the myrtle at Scroggs's.
I have often thought of what that doctor said about her:

that she would have been a very remarkable woman, if she had not been
an old maid -- I mean, a spinster.

The Burial of the Guns
Lee surrendered the remnant of his army at Appomattox, April 9, 1865,

and yet a couple of days later the old Colonel's battery lay intrenched
right in the mountain-pass where it had halted three days before.

Two weeks previously it had been detailed with a light division
sent to meet and repel a force which it was understood was coming in

by way of the southwestvalley to strike Lee in the rear of his long line
from Richmond to Petersburg. It had done its work. The mountain-pass

had been seized and held, and the Federal force had not gotten by that road
within the blue rampart which guarded on that side the heart of Virginia.

This pass, which was the key to the main line of passage over the mountains,
had been assigned by the commander of the division to the old Colonel

and his old battery, and they had held it. The position taken by the battery
had been chosen with a soldier's eye. A better place could not

have been selected to hold the pass. It was its highest point,
just where the road crawled over the shoulder of the mountain

along the limestone cliff, a hundred feet sheer above the deep river,
where its waters had cut their way in ages past, and now lay deep and silent,

as if resting after their arduous toil before they began to boil over
the great bowlders which filled the bed a hundred or more yards below.

The little plateau at the top guarded the descending road on either side
for nearly a mile, and the mountain on the other side of the river

was the centre of a clump of rocky, heavily timbered spurs, so inaccessible
that no feet but those of wild animals or of the hardiest hunter

had ever climbed it. On the side of the river on which the road lay,
the only path out over the mountain except the road itself

was a charcoal-burner's track, dwindling at times to a footway
known only to the mountain-folk, which a picket at the top

could hold against an army. The position, well defended, was impregnable,
and it was well defended. This the general of the division knew