Mrs. Purvine hardly looked the woman of a vaulting worldly ambition. She had a broad, moon-like face and blue eyes with much of the whites showing, the more as she had a trick of peering over her spectacles. She had no teeth; despite her social culture she had never heard of a false set, or her mouth would have been a glittering illustration of the dentist’s art. She held in her hand a short clay pipe, from which the smoke slowly curled. She wore a blue-checked homespun apron, but a calico gown, being, according to report, “too triflin’” to do very much weaving at home, and the cross-roads store was only ten miles from her house, on the road to Shaftesville. She had journeyed even to the town, twice or thrice in her life, mounted on a gray mare with a colt at her heels, and had looked from beneath her sun-bonnet at the metropolitan splendors and habits with a starveling’s delight in such of the meagre conventional graces of life as the little village possessed, and as were vouchsafed to her comprehension. Nobody knew whence she derived her “vagrantin’ ways;” for these excursions earned for her the reputation of an insatiate traveler, and her frivolous disposition and pride were the occasion of much reprehension and comment. They could hardly take the form of remonstrance, however, without open rupture; for Mrs. Purvine, right well aware of them, with an acumen and diplomacy grafted like some strange exotic upon her simple character, was always bewailing the frivolous tendency of the times, the pride of “some folks,” the worthless nature of women nowadays, and foisting herself upon her interlocutor as an example of all homely and primitive tastes and virtues. Her moon face suddenly assumed an expression of recognition and of stern reprobation as she came solemnly down from the door, a feat which it was difficult to perform with stateliness or even safety; for the two or three plank steps were only set against the wall, and although far more imposing than the hewn logs or rough stones customary elsewhere, they were extremely insecure. Often when a foot was placed upon the lowest of the number they careened forward with the weight. Mrs. Purvine accomplished the descent with dignity, and as she held the gate open she addressed her niece, looking full in her tear-stained face:— “I knowed it would kem ter this,—I knowed it, sooner or later. What’s that thar step-mother o’ yourn been doin’ ter ye?” Albeit Mrs. Sayles had few equals as a censor, Mrs. Purvine, with a secret intuition of her animadversions, returned them as best she might, and Mrs. Sayles’s difficult position as a step-mother rendered her as a shorn lamb to the blast. “Nuthin’,” sobbed Alethea,—“nuthin’ ez I knows on.” She started up the steps, which bounded forward with a precipitancy that had a startling effect as if the house had jumped at her. Alethea stumbled, and Mrs. Purvine commented upon her awkwardness:—