Podunk Pond, where for many years the Methodists held their services. When her father and mother were both dead and there was nothing to keep her in Ridgefield, she moved to Oak City, and, building herself a cottage on the Heights, lived mostly alone, except for the lodgers who came to her when the camp-meeting was in progress. The religious atmosphere of the place suited her, and, could she have had her way, nothing more exciting than the annual camp-meeting would have found entrance there. But the town was destined to grow, and as it increased in size, and hotels and handsome cottages were built on the Heights and Oceanside, and the streets were full of fashionably dressed people and stylish turnouts, she shook her head disapprovingly. She had renounced the world, the flesh and the devil twice, she said. Once by proxy when baptized in infancy in the Episcopal church, and again when, not holding her first baptism valid, she had been immersed in Podunk Pond, when the thermometer was nearly at zero and the wind was blowing a gale. It was a satisfaction to remember this. It seemed to make her a kind of martyr for endurance, and to freeze out any microbes of temptation which might assail her afterwards. In the sanctity of Oak City she lived a long time before the world, the flesh and the devil came to confront her with a persistence she could not resist. Fashion and folly, as she called every innovation upon her ideas of right, crowded thick and fast into the pretty town, until the camp-meeting was a secondary matter, and ignored by two-thirds of the guests, who, if they attended the services at all, did so from curiosity, or because it was pleasant to while away an hour or so in the huge open tabernacle built upon the spot where the first tent had been set up many years before for the worship of God. Miss Hansford, as one of the oldest residents, was a power in the community, and her opinion carried great weight in her own church, but she found herself stranded and helpless in the society which knew not Joseph, or, knowing, did not care. It was in vain that she lifted up her voice against the dances at the hotels, the roller-skating at the rink, the play-acting at the Casino, the ocean bathers in suits which she said made even her blush to look at, and, worst of all, the band, which on Sunday afternoons gave what was called a sacred concert in the open air,—concerts which crowds attended, but which Miss Hansford bitterly denounced. A device of Satan, she called them, and resolutely stopped her ears with cotton to shut out the profane sounds which floated across Lake Wenona to where she sat reading her Bible and deploring the sins of the times. But neither her prayers nor her disapproval availed to stem the tide so fast setting in towards Oak City. The dancing went on in the hotels, the skating in the rink, the play-acting in the Casino, the flirting in the streets, while the bathing suits of the ladies grew shorter and lower each year, until