And do it she did. Some way the house did get cleaned. "After a fashion," Elizabeth said. And the garden was made. Chilian and Eunice trimmed up roses. Cynthia and Miss Winn planted seeds. There were always some things that wintered over--sweet Williams, lilies of various sorts, pinks, laurels, some spiraeas, snowball and syringas, hosts of lilacs that made a fragrant hedge. Cynthia thought it had never been so lovely before. She wore a nosegay at her throat, and in her belt just a few; she had the fine taste that never overloaded. She and Cousin Chilian used to walk up and down the fragrant paths after supper and no one fretted at them about the dew. Sometimes Rachel or Eunice would bring out a dainty scarf. And how many things they found to talk about. She loved to dwell on the times with her father, and it seemed as if she remembered a great deal more about her mother than she did at first, but she never imagined it was Cousin Chilian's memory that helped out hers. She had enjoyed the school very much. There were no high up "isms" or "ologies" for girls in those days. She learned about her own country, for already there were some histories written, and the causes that led to the war. Some of the girls had grandmothers who had lived through those exciting years, and made the relation of incidents much more interesting than any dry written account that was mostly dates and names. What heroes they had been! And the old _Mayflower_ story and John Alden, and others who were to inspire a poet's pen. Then there was the dread story of the witchcraft that had led Salem astray. Cousin Chilian would never have it mentioned, and had taken away several books he did not want her to see. But the girls had gone to some of the old places, where witches had been taken from their homes and cast into jail, the Court House where they had been tried, and Gallows Hill, that most people shunned even now. One rainy evening, after her lessons had been studied, Cynthia went downstairs. Rachel had been fomenting her face for the toothache and was lying down. Cousin Chilian had gone to a town-meeting, and the house seemed so still that she almost believed she might see the ghost or witch of the stories she had heard. No one was in the sitting-room, or the kitchen proper, but she heard voices in what was called the summer kitchen, a roughly constructed place with a stone chimney and a great swinging crane. Here they did much of the autumn work, for Elizabeth was quite a stickler for having a common place to save something nicer. Mother Taft always smoked a pipe of tobacco in the evening. "It soothed her," she said, after her tussle of fixing her patient for the night, "and made her sleep better." "And it's my opinion if Miss 'Lisbeth could just have a good smoke at night 'twould do her more good than the doctor's powders." "Why, Cynthy!" Cousin Eunice exclaimed.