The storm-clouds piled higher and blacker, and the lightning flashes lit them now and then; but Miss Judy, looking out the open door of the passage, said that she thought the cloud-bank lay too far south for them to get a shower, that it had drifted too far away from the rain quarter. The darkness deepened fast, however. Sudden gusts of wind stirred the dust of the big road, and set little columns of it whirling along the darkening highway; but there was still nothing to disturb the little sisters, sitting peacefully, contented, close together in their low rocking-chairs. Miss Judy was now chirruping quite like herself, and Miss Sophia listening and nodding alternately in happy content. Nearly asleep, she did not hear the soft rustle of Miss Judy's bombazine skirt as it slipped off in the darkness. "You don't mind, do you, sister Sophia?" said Miss Judy, feeling, nevertheless, bound to apologize in respect for her sister. "It's too dark for any one passing to see. And it does make the back breadths so shiny to sit on them, no matter how lightly you try to sit down," she added, as if she could sit any other way, dear little atom of humanity! Nine o'clock was their bedtime, winter and summer, although it must be said that Miss Sophia was always perfectly willing to go to bed earlier. That night they arose, as they always did, on the solemn, lonesome stroke of the court-house clock, and turned up their little rocking-chairs side by side, with the seats to the wall, tilting them so that the cat could not make a bed of the patchwork cushions, and thus be tempted from her plain duty of attending to the mice in the garret and the rats in the kitchen. The chairs being thus settled, as if for the saying of their prayers all night, Miss Judy bent down, and, taking both hands, rolled the cannon-ball out of the hollow which it had worn in the daytime, and sent it rumbling into the hollow which it had worn in the night-time. Shutting the door, she then dropped the wooden bar across it as a mere matter of routine propriety, and, after this was done, the little sisters began to undress with their backs to one another. When they were at last quite ready to retire, when Miss Sophia was in bed and Miss Judy was on the point of ascending by means of the chair, before blowing out the candle, there was some polite discussion and a good deal of hesitation whether or not to close the window at the foot of the bed. The ultimate decision was to leave it open, Miss Judy thinking this best on account of the night's being so warm, and the clouds having drifted so far round that there appeared little likelihood of rain before morning; and Miss Sophia's thinking that she thought as Miss Judy did, in this as in everything else. The window was accordingly left open, and this final question being settled, the little sisters laid themselves down side by side, and bade one another a formal good night, and wished