It was quite an exclusive affair in its way, so that this year, when they were both invited to attend with their mother, Jean and Kit felt the honor. Long afterwards, when she had attained her assured place in the world of art, Jean exhibited a painting which won her her first medal. It was only a shadowy interior of an old meetinghouse. The sunshine filtered through half-closed green blinds at the long windows. Up on the platform there sat Professor Carberry, a little, shrunken figure in black broadcloth, the lean, scholarly old face, blanched with the snows of eighty-odd years, filled with eagerness as he looked down on the little assembled remnant of the old guard. Cousin Bethiah Newell always said that this picture was Jean's masterpiece, and she got the inspiration for it on this day. Kit sat very erect at her end of the pew, but even she, who prided herself on being unemotional, had tears on her lashes listening to these dear old-time scholars reciting the poetry out of their old fourth and fifth readers. Judge Ellis rose with a radiant light in his eyes and spouted, "At midnight in his guarded tent, the Turk lay dreaming of the hour," and for an encore he rolled out "Old Ironsides." "Ay, tear her tattered ensign down, Long has it waved on high." Cousin Roxy obliged with "Woodman, spare that tree," but for an encore she gave a tender poem of old-time days, called "Twenty Years Ago." Its verses rang in Kit's head all the way home, and when she learned that Miss Daphne, too, had been one of the old Professor's scholars, she wrote them down and sent them west to her. "I've wandered to the village, Tom, I've sat beneath the tree, Upon that schoolhouse playground, That sheltered you and me. But few were there to greet me, Tom, And few were left we know, Who played with us upon the green, Just twenty years ago." "I'll never forget it as long as I live, Cousin Roxy," Kit declared, fervently; "talk about the twanging of heart strings; why, it seemed to me as though I could just feel the way you all felt as you sat there. It was the queerest thing, because Mrs. Peckham is stout and getting gray, and yet when she got up to recite she actually looked like a plump little girl with her brown eyes and rosy cheeks. And Deacon Simmons was as boyish as could be, when he stood there blushing and reading his class paper on 'Old Friendships.'"