Miss Sophia had never seemed very young, and she now appeared little if at all older. Her dark hair never whitened, and if the gray streaks over her placid temples had broadened slightly, it was no more trouble than it used to be to reach up the chimney and get a bit of soot on the tip of her finger--while Miss Judy was out of the room or looking the other way. It was an innocent artifice, but it remained always the darkest secret between the sisters. And this was probably not quite so dark a secret as Miss Sophia supposed it to be, since she, being so very plump, could not stand on tiptoe to look in the mirror, as Miss Judy did. Consequently, it was perhaps inevitable that the touching up intended for the gray streaks over Miss Sophia's placid temples, sometimes fell unawares on her honest little cheeks, or her guileless little ears. Almost unaltered as the sisters were, their environment was, if possible, even less changed by the quiet passing of the uneventful years. For all outward changes, this March morning on which Miss Judy looked out over the sleeping village might have been the first morning after the first settlers had made their homes in this vale of peace. The folding hills were yet covered by the primeval forest. The log houses built by the Virginians still straggled beside a single thoroughfare. The highway, too, was the same buffalo track which they had followed through the wilderness--just as crooked in its direction, just as irregular in its width, just as muddy in winter and dusty in summer, and it was called the "big road" now, just as it had been in the beginning. And the sleepers in the still darkened houses were, with scarcely an exception, the descendants of the sounder sleepers in the graveyard on the furthest, highest hilltop. For the people of that far-off Pennyroyal Region came and went in those old days only with the coming and the going of the generations.