Dilly took her placid companion by the arm, and hurried her on. Human jangling wore sadly upon her; under such maddening onslaught she was not incapable of developing "nerves." They stopped before a stall where another heifer stood, chewing her cud, and looking away into remembered pastures. "Oh, see!" said Molly, "'Price $500'! Do you b'lieve it?" "Well, well!" came Mrs. Eli Pike's ruminant voice from the crowd. "I'm glad I don't own that creatur'! I shouldn't sleep nights if I had five hunderd dollars in cow." "Tain't five hunderd dollars," said Hiram Cole, elbowing his way to the front. "'Tain't p'inted right, that's all. P'int off two ciphers--" "Five dollars!" snickered a Crane boy, diving through the crowd, and proceeding to stand on his head in a cleared space beyond. "That's wuth less'n Miss Lucindy's hoss!" Hiram Cole considered again, one lean hand stroking his cheek. "Five--fifty--" he announced. "Well, I guess _'tis_ five hunderd, arter all! Anybody must want to invest, though, to put all their income into perishable cow-flesh!" "You look real tired," whispered Molly. "Le's come inside, an' perhaps we can set down." The old hall seemed to have donned strange carnival clothes, for a mystic Saturnalia. It was literally swaddled in bedquilts,--tumbler-quilts, rising-suns, Jacob's-ladders, log-cabins, and the more modern and altogether terrible crazy-quilt. There were square yards of tidies, on wall and table, and furlongs of home-knit lace. Dilly looked at this product of the patient art of woman with a dispirited gaze. "Seems a kind of a waste of time, don't it?" she said, dreamily, "when things are blowin' outside? I wisht I could see suthin' made once to look as handsome as green buds an' branches. Law, dear, now jest turn your eyes away from them walls, an' see the tables full of apples! an' them piles o' carrots, an' cabbages an' squashes over there! Well, 'tain't so bad if you can look at things the sun's ever shone on, no matter if they be under cover." She wandered up and down the tables, caressing the rounded outlines of the fruit with her loving gaze. The apples, rich and fragrant, were a glory and a joy. There were great pound sweetings, full of the pride of mere bigness; long purple gilly-flowers, craftily hiding their mealy joys under a sad-colored skin; and the Hubbardston, a portly creature quite unspoiled by the prosperity of growth, and holding its lovely scent and flavor like an individual charm. There was the Bald'in, stand-by old and good as bread; and there were all the rest. We know them, we who have courted Pomona in her fair New England orchards.