“You go ahead and get acquainted with her,” urged Mr. Stagg. “She don’t like dogs. They chase her chickens and run over her flower-beds. Aunty Rose is peculiar, I might say.” “Oh, Uncle Joe!” repeated the little girl faintly. “You’ve got to make her like you, if you want to live here,” the hardware dealer concluded firmly; “and that’s all there is to it.” He gave Carolyn May a little shove up the path, and then stood back and mopped his brow with his handkerchief. Prince strained at the leash and whined, wishing to follow his little mistress. Mr. Stagg said: “You’d better keep mighty quiet, dog. If you want your home address to be The Corners, sing small!” Carolyn May did not hear this, but disappeared after the fowls around the corner of the wide, vine-draped porch. The pleasant back yard was full of sunshine. On the gravel path beyond the old well, with its long sweep and bucket, half a hundred chickens, some guineas, and a flock of turkeys scuffled for grain which was being thrown to them from an open pan. That pan was held in the plump hand of a very dignified-looking woman, dressed in drab, and with a sunbonnet on her head. Her voluminous skirt blew about her tall figure; she was plump, but very upright; her cheeks were rosy; her spectacles sparkled; and her full lips were puckered into a matrix for the mellow call: “Chuck! Chuck! Chuck-a-chuck!” Aunty Rose’s appearance smote the little girl with a feeling of awe. Her bonnet was so stiffly starched, the line of her old-fashioned stays across her plump shoulders was as unequivocal as a confession of faith. And when she turned her face to the child, the latter, young as she was, knew that the woman’s attitude to all the world was despotic. There was no frown on her face; it was only calm, unruffled, unemotional. It simply seemed as though nothing, either material or spiritual, could ruffle the placidity of Aunty Rose Kennedy. She came of Quaker stock, and the serenity of body and spirit taught by the sect built a wall between her and everybody else. At least, so it seemed to Carolyn May. And when Aunty Rose first looked at her, she seemed to the child to be merely peering over that wall. The little girl could not get close enough to the woman to “snuggle up.” “Child, who are you?” asked Aunty Rose with some curiosity. The little girl told her name; but perhaps it was her black frock and hat that identified her in Aunty Rose’s mind, after all. “You are Hannah Stagg’s little girl,” she said. “Yes’m—if you please,” Carolyn May confessed faintly. “And how came you here alone?” “If you please, Uncle Joe said I’d better prob’ly come ahead and get acquainted with you first.” “‘First’? What do you mean, ‘first’?” asked Aunty Rose sternly. “First—before you saw Prince,” responded the perfectly frank little girl. “Uncle Joe thought maybe you wouldn’t care for dogs.” “Dogs!” “No, ma’am. And, of course, where I live, Prince has to live, too. So——” “So you brought the dog?”