so, for I believe there comes to many of us at times a glimpse of what seems familiar, because we have been unconscious actors in something like it before. To Paul, however, only the present was tangible, and he enjoyed it thoroughly and played at smugglers and pirates and robbers and prisoners, in the queer room built around the big chimney. For a little time the Ralstons returned to Boston, while the finishing touches were given to the house. Then they came back for the summer and there were signs of life everywhere around the handsome place. Occasionally Miss Hansford met the Ralston carriage with the Judge and his wife, a dainty little lady with a sweet, gentle face showing under her hat, which Miss Hansford decided was too youthful for a woman of her age to wear. As a rule, Miss Hansford did not take kindly to people who owned houses or cottages in Oak City, and only spent a few weeks in the summer there, bringing with them an assumption of superiority over their neighbors in the shape of horses and carriages and servants and city ways, which she did not like. They were pretty sure to be “stuck-ups” or nobodies. Of the two she preferred the former. There had never been much money in the Hansford line, but there was plenty of blood of the bluest sort. Miss Hansford had the family tree at her fingers’ ends, and not a twig would she lop off, much less the branches reaching back to Oliver Cromwell and Miles Standish and a feudal lord in Scotland who held his castle days and weeks against a besieging party. At the Ralstons she first looked doubtfully. The old smuggler, whose bones were whitening off the Banks of Newfoundland, was not a desirable appendage, but to offset him was an ancestor who had heard the Indian war cry and helped to empty the chests of tea into the ocean on the night of the Boston Tea Party, while another had died at the battle of Bunker Hill, and these two atoned for shiploads of contraband goods and made the Ralstons somebody. Paul Miss Hansford had scarcely seen, except as he galloped down the avenue on his pony, until he came to ask forgiveness and make restitution. Then she was surprised to find how her heart went out to the boy, and after he was gone she began to consider the propriety of calling upon his mother. “I don’t s’pose she cares whether I call or not,” she thought, “but I am about the oldest settler on the Island, and then if Miss Ralston returns it, it’ll be something to tell Mrs. Atwater, who has so much to say about her friends in Hartford.”