It was in what Captain William Pierce called the ebb of the afternoon; that dreamy, quiet leisure hour that falls in country places when the heavy work and heavy feeding of the day are over, and the evening milking and bedding the cattle and providing the pleasant meal called supper still lie in the middle distance. Priscilla, our own Priscilla, not forgotten or unloved, although unmentioned and a little hidden behind the throng of new-comers,--Priscilla Alden stood in the thrifty orchard of pear and apple trees, planted twenty years before by her goodman, trees whose lineal descendants may to-day be found in the place of the old ones, just as Aldens still till the Aldens’ farm. At the edge of the orchard a row of lime-trees shaded the well and the southern door of the comfortable house, and beneath these trees were set the beehives, whose dainty denizens loved the golden blossoms so well that from morning until night they swarmed up and down their fragrant pasture, making a sound like the surf upon a pebbly shore. Priscilla is gone, those trees, those bees are gone, and you and I are going, but the bees of to-day swarm just as vigorously through this lime-tree at my window as those did then, and as the bees of two or three centuries hence will through the trees whose seeds are not yet planted. Only man is ephemeral and changeable: the bees and the trees are conservative. Some such idea, but too vague to be recognized by an unspeculative brain, floated through Priscilla’s mind as, leaning against the trunk of her favorite pear-tree, she gazed up into the yellow lime blossoms, listened to the bees, and remembered the years when she and John had planted the trees, while their little children looked on and asked questions. “Ah well, ah well!” murmured she at last. “’Tis their nature to swarm--the children and the bees, both; and Betty shall have the best hive as soon as they’re settled. Ah me!” Then with one of her old impetuous motions Priscilla dashed her hands across her eyes and cleared them of the coming tears. Good, kindly, honest eyes still, if not so bright or so brown as they were once, and as Betty’s are now; and a comely matron face, albeit the colors are somewhat ripened; and the chestnut hair, lined with a silver thread here and there, is put back under a matron’s coif, but the mobile lips still disclose perfect teeth, and John Alden still holds it a delight to take a kiss from those lips, and put his finger under that smooth, round chin. ’Tis no more than later summer yet, and the frosts of autumn are as yet far distant.