"Are we most there, Mardie?" asked Sue for the twentieth time. "Look at me! I'm being a butterfly, or perhaps a white pigeon. No, I'd rather be a butterfly, and then I can skim along faster and move my wings!" The airy little figure, all lightness and brightness, danced along the road, the white cotton dress rising and falling, the white-stockinged legs much in evidence, the arms outstretched as if in flight, straw hat falling off yellow hair, and a little wisp of swansdown scarf floating out behind like the drapery of a baby Mercury. "We are almost there," her mother answered. "You can see the buildings now, if you will stop being a butterfly. Don't you like them?" "Yes, I 'specially like them all so white. Is it a town, Mardie?" "It is a village, but not quite like other villages. I have told you often about the Shaker Settlement, where your grandmother brought me once when I was just your age. There was a thunder-storm; they kept us all night, and were so kind that I never forgot them. Then your grandmother and I stopped off once when we were going to Boston. I was ten then, and I remember more about it. The same sweet Eldress was there both times." "What is an El-der-ess, Mardie?" "A kind of everybody's mother, she seemed to be," Susanna responded, with a catch in her breath. "I'd 'specially like her; will she be there now, Mardie?" "I'm hoping so, but it is eighteen years ago. I was ten and she was about forty, I should think." "Then o' course she'll be dead," said Sue, cheerfully, "or either she'll have no teeth or hair." "People don't always die before they are sixty, Sue." "Do they die when they want to, or when they must?" "Always when they must; never, never when they want to," answered Sue's mother. "But o' course they wouldn't ever _want_ to if they had any little girls to be togedder with, like you and me, Mardie?" And Sue looked up with eyes that were always like two interrogation points, eager by turns and by turns wistful, but never satisfied. "No," Susanna replied brokenly, "of course they wouldn't, unless sometimes they were wicked for a minute or two and forgot." "Do the Shakers shake all the time, Mardie, or just once in a while? And shall I see them do it?" "Sue, dear, I can't explain everything in the world to you while you are so little; you really must wait until you're more grown up. The Shakers don't shake and the Quakers don't quake, and when you're older, I'll try to make you understand why they were called so and why they kept the name." "Maybe the El-der-ess can make me understand right off now; I'd 'specially like it." And Sue ran breathlessly along to the gate where the North Family House stood in its stately, white-and-green austerity.