“She eats alone,” the tavern-keeper's wife confided to their eager ears, “and asks for no service. Oh, she's a curiosity! She's got her story,--you'll see!” In a town where every man knew every other man, and whether or not he paid his taxes on time, and what his standing was in church, and all the skeletons of his home, a stranger alien to their ways disturbed their peace of mind. “An upland meadow where clover and mignonette will grow,” she had said, and such an one she found, and planted thick with fine white clover and with mignonette. Then, while the carpenters raised her cabin at the border of the meadow, near the street, she passed among the villagers, mingling with them gently, winning their good-will, in spite of themselves. The cabin was of unbarked maple logs, with four rooms and a rustic portico. Then all the villagers stared in very truth. They, living in their trim and ugly little homes, accounted houses of logs as the misfortune of their pioneer parents. A shed for wood, a barn for the Jersey cow, a rustic fence, tall, with a high swinging gate, completed the domain. In the front room of the cabin was a fireplace of rude brick. In the bedrooms, cots as bare and hard as a nun's, and in the kitchen the domestic necessaries; that was all. The poorest house-holder in the town would not have confessed to such scant furnishing. Yet the richest man might well have hesitated before he sent to France for hives and hives of bees, as she did, setting them up along the southern border of her meadow. Later there came strong boxes, marked with many marks of foreign transportation lines, and the neighbor-gossips, seeing them, imagined wealth of curious furniture; but the man who carted them told his wife, who told her friend, who told her friend, that every box to the last one was placed in the dry cemented cellar, and left there in the dark. “An' a mighty ridic'lous expense a cellar like that is, t' put under a house of that char'cter,” said the man to his wife--who repeated it to her friend. “But that ain't all,” the carpenter's wife had said when she heard about it all, “Hank says there is one little room, not fit for buttery nor yet fur closit, with a window high up--well, you ken see yourself-an' a strong door. Jus' in passin' th' other day, when he was there, hangin' some shelves, he tried it, an' it was locked!” “Well!” said the women who listened.