All her life Phoebe had lived in the little mountain cabin. She had never known a mother and she had never had a friend. Her father had taught her many things, however, and one was to read from the books on the shelf. There were several books on astronomy; Pilgrim's Progress; the Bible; a volume of Shakespeare; a history of England; a translation of the "Iliad", and some volumes of poetry:--Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Where her father had got these books and the silver and the blue china, she knew no more than he. He had tried and tried to remember, but he had forgotten. He had no identity, no past. His name, his family, everything connected with his early life had gone. His past life had stopped when he had gone for a physician. He had taught his little girl to read, as we have said, and when old enough she had often read aloud in the long winter evenings. He had seemed to listen with absorbed interest, but it is difficult to say how much he grasped of the words he heard, or whether they were mere words to him with no collective significance. With a certain instinct left to him from that mysterious dead past, he had imparted to his daughter an unmistakable refinement of speech and manner. About some things he was even fastidious,--her way of eating, the appearance of the table and the silver. He himself was excessively neat and orderly and had periods of great industry, weaving baskets of sweet grass and carving wood, not crudely, but with unusual taste, boxes and chalets, napkin rings and figures of animals. Where he had learned these arts his daughter never knew, but she imagined from an old Indian who had lived in the little cabin in the early days and had died when Phoebe was still quite small. As far as a man may be sane whose memory extends back only some eighteen years and who has only one illusion, Phoebe's father was sane. The baskets and woodcarving he and his daughter peddled through the country with success, because they were exceedingly well done, and the money earned was sufficient for their small needs. Too excited from the unusual events of the night to sleep, Phoebe lay on the divan in the living room and reviewed the mysteries that filled her life. She had a strange smattering of knowledge for a girl of eighteen. It would seem that she had been gifted with a memory for two since her father had none, and whatever she learned from the row of books on the shelves she remembered. That is, whatever interested her. She knew the constellations and the planets, and on summer nights had located them in the heavens by means of the book chart. She would point them out to her father, who glanced at them vaguely, smiled and went on playing the zither, his consolation in idle moments.