IN the clean, large kitchen of a Virginia farm-house sat an old woman alone, knitting. She had been pretty once; fifty years ago that wrinkled yellow skin had been called "creamy," and the scant gray hair drawn back under the plain cap had been a shower of brown curls. And she had coquetted with Judge Holt and turned away from him at the last to marry plain Nathan Bennett, living with him in rare contentment for two-score years, and then coming to spend the remnant of her days with her daughter Ann. Now Ann, too, was gone, and only the children were left; Ben and Nancy, and her own adopted child, Lura Ann. She smoothed down her neat gray cashmere gown, which had been her "second best" dress since Ann's death, and leaned back more comfortably against the cushioned surface of the splint rocking-chair. "They're good children," she said to herself,--"excepting Nancy. And she's not so bad as might be." She cast a satisfied glance at the meadows and fields stretching as far as her eyes could reach, and then looked lovingly at the dwarf apple-trees whose branches pressed against the window-shutters. Some of the pink blossoms lay on the ledge. It was May. The flies were buzzing, the sparrows twittering, as they stole cotton from the body of a doll lying in the yard and flew up to the roof with it. A little girl came around the house and picked up the doll, shook it, looked up at the eaves where the mother sparrow sat, muttered something in an angry tone, and entered the house, singing. She sang: "The apples were ripe and beginning to fall, beginning to fall!" "Ah, yes," said her grandmother, "you'll see the apples fall a many times, but I shall scarcely see 'em more'n once more--once or twice more, at most. Well, well, I'll be contented to die if only I can live to see my boy and Lura Ann----" then she stopped, meeting the child's bright eyes. "Lura Ann is going to marry Sackford Moss," said the child. An angry flush came over the old woman's thin face; she jerked her knitting, and one of her needles fell to the floor. "Now you're mad, granny, and it's wicked to be mad, so I shan't hand you your knitting-needle," sang the little girl, in a silvery voice. "Then you'll have no stockings to wear when the biting frost comes; but you don't care--you don't care. 'Tis a generation that thinks not of the future, but works its will in the present," moaned the old woman, folding her hands together hard. "I'll hand you your needle if you'll tell Lura Ann to make waffles for supper," said the sharp child; but her grandmother looked upon her with disfavor and did not reply. After a moment the little girl came quietly forward and laid the needle on her lap, but the old woman did not resume her knitting. She sat with her hands folded, and looked at intervals out of the window, but with a much-wrinkled brow.