The guests at the birthday feast had been a pair of grandparents, a young uncle and aunt, and a ten-year-old girl from the farmhouse down the road. The little girl, brave in her well-flounced, orange-spotted purple delaine, wore pantalets that had been made much too long for her, in anticipation of some prodigious growth which had not taken place; and these had been starched too stiffly, so that she creaked audibly during locomotion. But she was very happy at the party; and though her costume might appear but ill-suited to the rigors of a Vermont winter, it must be remembered that in those days female attire had no commerce with common sense. Promptly at half-past five her mother came for her, bustling competently into the house, with an accompaniment of impatient sleigh-bells outside; and she glanced with undisguised curiosity at the spread table, not yet cleared away, the birthday cake with its heathenish three candles, and the young heir himself. “They say he hain’t never been punished none?” Nancy flushed, and held back an angry answer. She was aware that the subject had already been torn to tatters by the village gossips. “Punished? No, not yet.” “I want to know! Wal, I guess he’s needed it, afore now!” The farm-wife was emphatic; but there was motherly love as well as village curiosity in her scrutiny of little Samuel. “Looks jest like a young American flag, don’t he? Them blue pants, and red cheeks, and eyes stickin’ out so kinda starry. But all childern needs punishments,” she chirped. “They’re all of ’em limbs of Satan. I’ve had seven, and I guess I know.” She cast an eagle eye on the pantalets of her first “limb.” “Them Hamburg points allus ketch up every mite of dust,” she lamented, as she tucked her child under a buffalo robe and drove away through the snow. “Wal, she knows a lot, if she knows all she thinks she doos,” was the grandmother’s placid comment, as she and the aunt cleared away the feast. “Nancy has no call to mind _her_.” It was evident that Nancy was a creature lovingly set apart in that little world. Having borne the brunt of the birthday preparations, she was not allowed to put on her all-enveloping kitchen apron again, but was forced down into her own chair in the bright sitting-room. Rather early, because of the bitter weather, the guests had gone, and the family was left to itself in a loving intimacy precious to each of the three.