"So this poor Mrs. Julia woman was now stricken for fair, thinking of all the trouble she'd been to about her tickets, and all to see this new fiddle. "She went weakly into the house and lay down, with a headache, till I was ready to leave the gay throng. And the next day she left us to our fate. Still, she'd done us good. Dave has a new fiddle and Aunt Mollie has her high white shoes. So now you know all about it." We neared the Arrowhead gate. Presently its bell would peal a sweet message to those who laboured. Ma Pettengill turned in her saddle to scan the western horizon. "A red sun has water in his eye," said she. "Well, a good soak won't hurt us." And a moment later: "Curious thing about reformers: They don't seem to get a lot of pleasure out of their labours unless the ones they reform resist and suffer, and show a proper sense of their degradation. I bet a lot of reformers would quit to-morrow if they knew their work wasn't going to bother people any." VI THE PORCH WREN So it befell, in a shining and memorable interlude that there was talk of the oldest living boy scout, who was said to have rats in his wainscoting; of the oldest living débutante, who was also a porch wren; and of the body snatcher. Little of the talk was mine; a query now and again. It was Ma Pettengill's talk, and I put it here for what it may be worth, hoping I may close-knit and harmonize its themes, so diverse as that of the wardrobe trunk, the age of the earth, what every woman thinks she knows, and the Upper Silurian trilobites. It might be well to start with the concrete, and baby's picture seems to be an acceptable springboard from which to dive into the recital. It came in the evening's mail and was extended to me by Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, with poorly suppressed emotion. The thing excited no emotion in me that I could not easily suppress. It was the most banal of all snapshots--a young woman bending Madonna-wise above something carefully swathed, flanked by a youngish man who revealed a self-conscious smirk through his carefully pointed beard. The light did harshly by the bent faces of the couple and the disclosed fragment of the swathed thing was a weakish white blob. I need not say that there must be millions of these pathetic revealments burdening our mails day by day. I myself must have looked coldly upon over a thousand. "Well, what of it?" I demanded shortly. "I bet you can't guess what's in that bundle!" said my hostess in a large playful manner. I said what I could see of it looked like a half portion of plain boiled cauliflower, but that in all probability the object was an infant, a human infant--or, to use a common expression, a baby. Whereupon the lady drew herself up and remarked in the clipped accent of a parrot: "No, sir; it's a carboniferous trilobite of the Upper Silurian."