That day had no sweet association for her since her mother’s death, but, though she had been only a little child, she could remember walking by her mother’s side to church, with her little starched skirts swinging, and her mitted hands folded demurely over her pocket handkerchief, while the bells rang a cheery call to prayer. There had been no bells on the meeting-house to which the scholars of Friend Ruth’s school were taken every First Day, and nothing about the service to remind her of the church where she had sat by her mother’s side in the high-backed pew and heard the hymns lined out, trying to follow the singing of the congregation with her wee sweet voice; but now the bells harked back over the years and brought an aching memory of her almost forgotten little girlhood. A sudden longing to go to church as she used to do came over her, and she decided to find a place in the village to stay over Sunday and go to service in the little white-spired church. Besides, it was against the law in those days for any one to travel unnecessarily on the Sabbath day. Dawn never thought of doing so, any more than she would have contemplated the possibility of stealing. It chanced that she arrived at the village tavern about the same time as the stage-coach from the opposite direction, and no one noticed that she had not come on the stage, for there were a number of travellers who stopped off here for the Sabbath. Seeing them descending from the coach, she went in haste to the landlady and begged that she might have a tiny room to herself. She was a little frightened at the thought of paying a whole dollar out of her small hoard for the lodging and her meals until after breakfast Monday morning, but she shut her eyes to the thought of it and took the room. It was only a tiny one over a shed that was given her, but everything was clean and sweet, and the supper smells came richly up through the open window to her hungry senses. On the whole, she was quite content when she lay down to rest in her own little room that night and dreamed of church-bells, and weddings, and sweet fields of clover and new-mown hay. CHAPTER XVIII The next morning the roosters crowing under her window awakened her, and for the moment she thought she was back in school, with the barn-yard not far away; but other and unfamiliar sounds and odors brought her back to realities, and she remembered she was a lone traveller putting up at an inn.