I was outdoors most of the day, and that night, when I awoke about three o’clock, suddenly and with a shock, thinking I had heard Aunty Sabrine’s voice crying: “Cunnle! wheah are you, Cunnle?” my exhausted brain took it for the echo of a dream. I must have dozed for an hour before I sprang up with a certainty in my mind that I had heard her voice in very truth. Then I hurried on my clothes, and ran to Alfred Winthrop’s. He looked incredulous; but he got into his boots like a man. We found Aunty Sabrine, alive but unconscious, on the crest of the hill. When we had secured an asylum for her, we searched for the Colonel. The next day we learned that he had heard the news of the election and had boarded a snow–clearing train that was returning to the Junction. It was a week before Aunty Sabrine recovered. When I asked her if she was going to look for the Colonel, she answered with gentle resignation: “No, seh. I’m ’most too old. I’ll stay hyeh, wheah he knows wheah to find me. He’ll come afteh me, sho’.” * * * * * Sixteen months passed, and he did not come. Then, one evening, a Summer walk took me by the little house. I heard a voice I could not forget. “Hyeh, you black niggeh, get along with that suppeh, or I come in theah and cut youh damn haid off!” Looking up, I saw Colonel Brereton, a little the worse for wear, seated on the snake fence. No ... he was not seated; he was hitched on by the crook of his knees, his toes braced against the inside of the lower rail. His coat–tails hung in the vacant air. [Illustration] He descended, a little stiffly, I thought, and greeted me cordially, with affable dignity. His manner somehow implied that it was _I_ who had been away. He insisted on my coming into his front yard and sitting down on the bench by the house, while he condescendingly and courteously inquired after the health of his old friends and neighbors. I stayed until supper was announced. The Colonel was always the soul of hospitality; but on this occasion he did not ask me to join him. And I reflected, as I went away, that although he had punctiliously insisted on my sitting down, the Colonel had remained standing during our somewhat protracted conversation. [Illustration] A ROUND–UP. [Illustration: “_She was beautiful as the Queen of Sheba was beautiful._”] A ROUND–UP. I. When Rhodora Boyd—Rhodora Pennington that was—died in her little house, with no one near her but one old maid who loved her, the best society of the little city of Trega Falls indulged in more or less complacent reminiscence. Except to Miss Wimple, the old maid, Rhodora had been of no importance at all in Trega for ten long years, and yet she had once given Trega society the liveliest year it had ever known. (I should tell you that Trega people never mentioned the Falls in connection with Trega. Trega was too old to admit any indebtedness to the Falls.)