This gave me my chance to explain father’s errand. “Do you think Dr. Russell can get Aunt Lucy in?” she asked, eagerness bringing a pretty colour to her cheeks. “It isn’t the care of her we mind, Ma and I,” she added hastily, “but it’s the loneliness for her of days in winter when I’m at school and Ma out nursing mebbe; being chair-tied at best, there’s just nothing to break the time, for nothing ever happens.” “Now that you have the Rural Free Delivery, you get your mail and papers every day without having to go down to the Hattertown post-office,” I said, trying to find a cheerful loophole. “That’s no advantage to us, rather the other way. When town was alive and we drove down to the post-office, even if we had no mail, and we never do except the newspaper, somebody else had and maybe opened it right there and told the news for the sake of talking it over with some one else. Then market and store were in the same building and chances were you’d be reminded of something you needed by seeing it, or maybe a bit of fresh meat would look tempting and be sold reasonable, too, if it was near week-end. But to go to that box at cross-roads, though it’s only a step, and find it empty, it’s as lonesome and strange as a draught coming from a shut-up room.” Then as she realized that she was in a way complaining of her lot to a stranger, a thing that the etiquette of the entire hill country quite forbade, she broke off, and turning toward the house, said in a perfectly unembarrassed way: “Won’t you come in? Mother will have dinner ready. She’d be pleased to see you. I have to hurry back to school to-day, for the committee man is coming to see if the old stove can be mended or if we must have a new one, for it’s never done well since Joel Fanton put a shotgun cartridge in it last winter.” Then we went in, wondering if events would ever so shape themselves that she would become an active factor on a wider path than that between the corner school and the old farm-house. It was three years before I saw Miranda again; meanwhile, a far-away city had thrown a lariat of steel across country, and it had encircled Hattertown; a railway that ran down the valley needed a southern outlet. The survey ran by the ruined factory, and rounding Nob Hill, crossed the river below the Banks’ farm, and disappeared on trestles over “calf pastures,” a name given strangely enough to many a bit of waste river meadow, as if calves did not need the best of material to become successful cows. At the sound of the first locomotive whistle, announcing that the branch road was a thing accomplished and neither a scare nor a phantom boom, the Rip Van Winkles awoke and rubbed their eyes. They had slept a half-famished sleep. Rather than push and plan a way to sell their produce, they had ceased producing.