In the lonesomest road I travelled while homeward bound from Reading, I stopped at a little faded cottage to inquire the way and the distance to the nearest town. An old white haired woman came to the door and gave as much information as she possessed, but she confessed she hadn’t been to town for more than sixteen years. “And do you live all alone in this dreary place the year ’round?” I inquired. “No, not always alone,” she replied, with a peculiar smile. “Once a month the groceryman sends the boy out with my store goods and flour, and a neighbor living just over the hill comes over every week to see if I have any wood chopped, and to fix the pasture field fence so that my cow can’t get away. Besides this one or two neighbor women call sometimes and do their sewing while telling me the news from the outside world.” “But at night you are alone, and that is the dreariest time of all,” I suggested. “No, I’m not alone even during the night, stranger. I have very realistic dreams while I sleep. During the year I am visited by all of my old friends and schoolmates. Not all at one time, to be sure, but every night one or the other of them will call on me, and we’ll all be young again and play the dear old games we loved so well when we were boys and girls. And the boy who was killed in the mines away back in ’78 comes back once a week and in my dreams I mend his clothes and wash his shirts, the same as I used to do in the long ago.” “Sort of a sad dream,” I remarked. “No, not at all! Why should it make one sad to dream of those we loved, and who loved us long ago? Last night my husband came back to see me, and he was killed in the mines away back in ’67. He was just like he appeared to me the morning he went to the mine and to his death.” “Were you glad to see him?” I asked, for she stopped short and was looking out toward the wooded hills with a glad smile on her face. “Glad to see him? Why, I was just as glad as I was when he used to come courting me down in Lebanon a half century ago! He always puts his arms around me and gives me a gentle embrace, and kisses me on the lips, just as he did when he was my lover and I was his girl sweetheart. And then he sits at the chimney and lights his pipe and smokes in silence, and I mend his clothes. By and by I fill his dinner pail, and before he starts away he asks me to the door, where he embraces me once more, and I hold up my lips for his farewell kiss; and then I stand there in the early morning light and watch him pass down the road and around the bend and disappear behind the bunch of laurels, just as I used to watch him long ago.” “And your dreams make you feel happy during the next day, I suppose,” I remarked, for she was again looking dreamily towards the hills.