Seating herself upon the piazza, which extended on three sides of her cottage, and still watching the boat now moving out to sea, she said aloud: “Yes, I begin to feel it in my bones that it’s going to be an uncommon summer. Something out of the usual run. I don’t know, though, why I need be so anxious. I’ve enough to carry me through, and more, too, and I don’t want ’em to fight over the little there will be left when I’m gone. There ain’t many to fight, either. The nearest of kin is Roger, and I vowed I wouldn’t give him a thing when he married Lucy Potter.” Here Miss Hansford paused in her soliloquy and changed her position a little, moving her left knee across her right and rolling her calico apron around her hands, which worked nervously as she recalled her old home in Ridgefield, a pretty inland town among the New England hills. In the cemetery there a host of Hansfords were lying,—her grandparents, her father and mother, her brothers and sisters,—sixteen in all,—and she had followed them one by one to their graves until there was only left her nephew, the recreant Roger, who had married Lucy Potter. For a few minutes Miss Hansford’s face was shadowed with memories of the farm-house, whose windows looked across the meadow and the river to the graves in the cemetery; then, brightening up with the thought that there was “no use in crying for spilt milk,” she returned to her talk of the coming season, which her bones told her was to be a profitable one. “If the Methodists have as big a camp-meeting as they had last year, and the Baptists do anything at all, and the teachers come to the Institute, and the hotels are full, things’ll be lively for a spell,” she said, “and I wouldn’t wonder if I rented all my rooms, even to the back chamber, where a tall body can’t stand straight except in the centre. Folks mostly don’t take to it, because there’s no view from the windows, except the oak woods. Can’t see the water at all; seems as if inlanders were daft on the sea. If they had lived as long as I have, year in and year out, in sound of its fretting and moaning, from morning till night and night till morning; and if they could see it in winter when a storm is raging over it and the waves break on the shore with a noise like thunder, they’d sing another song than ‘The sea, the sea, the beautiful sea.’ It’s pretty, though, when it’s calm and still and there’s fifty or a hundred sails in sight, as I have counted when the yachts were anchored near here. Oak City ain’t as fashionable as Newport or Narragansett Pier, but it’s a mighty good place to rest in, and there isn’t a prettier spot on the whole coast from Maine to Florida, especially on a morning like this.”