or was it the chance prejudice of a simple people? It was late when we broke up and left the office--Dan Gregg, Henry Larmy, the reporter, and old George. As we parted, looking up at the stars where our ways divided out under the elms, we heard, far up Exchange Street, the clatter of the pianola in the Markley home, and saw the high windows glowing like lost souls in the night. VIII "A Bundle of Myrrh" One of the first things that a new reporter on our paper has to learn is the kinology of the town. Until he knows who is kin to whom, and how, a reporter is likely at any time to make a bad break. Now, the kinology of a country town is no simple proposition. After a man has spent ten years writing up weddings, births and deaths, attending old settlers' picnics, family reunions and golden weddings, he may run into a new line of kin that opens a whole avenue of hitherto unexplainable facts to him, showing why certain families line up in the ward primaries, and why certain others are fighting tooth and toe-nail. The only person in town who knows all of our kinology--and most of that in the county, where it is a separate and interminable study--is "Aunt" Martha Merryfield. She has lived here since the early fifties, and was a Perkins, one of the eleven Perkins children that grew up in town; and the Perkinses were related by marriage to the Mortons, of whom there are over fifty living adult descendants on the town-site now. So one begins to see why she is called "Aunt Martha" Merryfield. She is literally aunt to over a hundred people here, and the habit of calling her aunt has spread from them to the rest of the population. She lives alone in the big brick house on the hill, though her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are in and out all day and most of the night, so that she is not at all lonesome. She is the only person to whom we can look for accurate information about local history, and when a man dies who has been at all prominent in affairs of the town or county or State, we always call up "Aunt" Martha on the 'phone, or send a reporter to her, to learn the real printable and unprintable truth about him. She knows whom he "went with" before he was married, and why they "broke off," and what crowd he associated with in the early days; how he got his money, and what they used to "say" about him. If a family began putting on frills, she can tell how the head of the house got his start by stealing "aid" sent to the grasshopper sufferers and opening a store with the goods. If a woman begins speaking of the hired girl as her "maid," contrary to the vernacular rules of the town, Aunt Martha does not hesitate to bring up the subject of the flour-sack underwear which the woman wore when she was a girl during the drought of '60.