I asked leave to show her the magazine, and she invited me into the cool of her home. The middle floor was covered with a yellow oil-cloth, on which there stood a table. A large cooking-stove occupied one side of the room. A few wooden-bottom chairs were ranged around the walls. An old kitchen clock rested on the mantel-shelf; and on either side of it hung a faded photograph, each in an oval wooden frame. The old woman asked me to draw up a chair to the table, and she sat beside me, looking with the excited interest of a child at the pictures which I showed her, but paying little heed, I thought, to what I was saying. Presently, without warning, she veered mentally with the facility of childhood, and now she was looking at me intently between the eyes, while one long skeleton hand lay on the open page before her. "Be you a pedler?" she asked, and her eyes dilated to the measure of the protruding sockets over which the yellow skin was tightly drawn. "I am trying to get subscribers for this magazine," I told her. "Was you raised in these parts?" My negative gave her the opening for which she was unconsciously feeling. She was born and "raised" on that spot, and had lived there for nearly eighty years, and she hastened to tell me so. There was nothing voluble in the recital of her history, only a directness and simplicity of speech and a certain quiet reserve which rendered the narrative absorbing to us both. Some bond of sympathy began to make itself felt, for she was dwelling on the losses of her life, and, quite unconsciously, she wept as she told me of the death of one and another, until not one of all her family or kindred was left to her, except her grandson, with whom she now lived. She said no word of complaint; and, in the presence of her human sorrows, she had no memory of poverty, and of the bitter struggle against want which life had plainly been for her. She was sobbing softly, with her head bent upon the table, when she ceased speaking, and no comfort that I could offer her was comparable to the relief that she felt in telling her story. When I arose to go, she was breathing deeply, like a comforted child. For a stretch of several miles of country road I spurred myself to knock at every door to which I came. My reception was curiously uniform. I never got beyond the request for leave to show the magazine. The reply was invariably a negative; sometimes polite, but always emphatic. Once I did not get so far as that. A portly negress saw me approaching her cottage from the road, and, standing strident on guard before her door, she shouted to me across the meadow that nothing was wanted there, and that I might save myself the walk.