hand, and both hands in one. I send you her photograph, taken by an inferior artist compared with those you have East, but still a very good likeness. There is something in her face which reminds me of you as you looked many years ago when I was a little boy and you came to my father’s one day, wearing a white dress, and your long curls tied with a red ribbon. That’s the way I often think of you now, although I know you must have changed. I should like to see you again and the old places of my childhood, but I fear I never shall. With my family and salary there is little surplus for travelling, and then I am trying hard to save something for my boys’ education when they are older. Elithe has studied with me since leaving the only school we have here, and I think her a fair scholar. She would like so much to go East. Please God, she may sometime. I have just been sent for to go to the mines twelve miles away to see a young man who they think is very ill. Elithe is going with me, as she often does on my visits to the sick, and I verily believe the sound of her voice and the sight of her bright face does more for them than many doctors can do. The horses we are to ride are at the door, and I must say good-bye, with love from us all. “Your affectionate nephew, “ROGER HANSFORD.” “P. S.—I need not tell you how glad I shall be to hear from you. Letters are like angels’ visits.” This was Roger’s letter, and as Miss Hansford read it for the second time, the tears rolled down her cheeks and dropped into her lap. The storm raging without was forgotten; the kitchen in which she sat in her loneliness vanished, and she was living forty-five years in the past, when she wore the white gown and her hair was bound with a crimson ribbon. She remembered the day so well and the little boy who had called her his pretty Auntie and played with her long curls, making lines of them while she was the horse to be driven. “Who would believe I ever wore a white gown and red ribbon?” she said, looking down at her plain calico dress and gingham apron, and thinking of her grey hair, combed back from her face as smoothly as she could comb it, for, in spite of her efforts, it had a trick of twining around her forehead and only needed a little coaxing to curl again as it once had done. She thought curls a device of Satan, and when she put him behind her she cut them off and burned them. It seemed to her now that she could smell the scorched hair blackening on the hearth, while she looked on with a feeling that, in some small degree, she was a martyr and doing God service. “Maybe I was morbid and went too far, but I want to do right in that and in everything else,” she said, and then her mind recurred again to Roger and his letter and what he had said of Elithe, who reminded him of her.