‘My! but don’t it look mournful!’ ejaculated Widder Luke, and then she continued: ‘My mother said ’twas rumored round Titusville that Hannah had caught a beau down to Salem. Of course that made a stir and folks wanted to know all the particulars, but all they could find out by hook or by crook was that ’twas a sea-captain, and that he was after his third wife, having buried his two others, and that he had asked Hannah to marry him; he gave her lots of heathenish stuff that he had brought from India for his first wife. They couldn’t seem to find out much more than that, when suddenly Hannah came home, without any warnin’; she brought an extry trunk back with her, but she did look dreadful peakid; she was sort of pale, and her eyes had a look just like her Grandfather Keys’; she hadn’t never looked like any of the Keyses before. She didn’t let on that anything had happened, and she went everywhere just the same, and nobody knew what she had brought home in that extry trunk, till one day, when the family had all gone to meetin’, Nancy Stack--she was Hannah’s mother’s sister--she went and peeked in the trunk and she saw a lot of trash, sea-shells and queer sorts of calico; but just as she went to lift the tray to see what else there was, she heard the folks comin’, so she shut it up quicker’n lightnin’; ’twas a snap-lock and her apron got caught; she couldn’t take time to open it, so she just tore off a piece of the hem to get away, meanin’ to go and get the scrap out some other time; but Hannah must have been in the habit of goin’ to that trunk, and before night she found the checked gingham caught in the lid, and Nancy Stark she left very sudden that afternoon and didn’t never set foot in the house again. It’s queer how it all comes back to me. I s’pose it’s seein’ the house gone and knowin’ how Hannah was took last night.’ ‘Oh, do tell us more,’ said Rita, breathlessly. ‘We know Mrs. Grant, their niece, and it is all so interesting.’ ‘Wall, folks _is_ generally interested in what they are interested in, but I don’t know that there’s much more to tell. The captain he never turned up to get his third wife. Nancy Stark she died, and Hannah and Maria here always lived up there alone since the old folks died, and a pretty lonesome spot it was, to be sure.’ ‘Did anybody ever dare to ask Miss Hannah about the captain?’ ‘No, I guess not; folks up here mind their own business pretty much.’ There was a silence after this rebuke; but Nan, who always began to hold on when other people let go, said: ‘I heard once that they had some beautiful china in the china-closet, some that had belonged to their grandmother.’ Nobody volunteered any remark about this. Mr. Briggs had got out and was poking round with a stick in the ashes. Nan persisted: ‘Did you ever see the china?’ ‘_I_ did’ said Jane Peebles, ‘sights of times.’ ‘What kind was it?’ ‘Oh, just blue willer pattern,--but there was sights of it.’