The occasion seemed to warrant the best dishes. I brought out six china plates and six spoons. These would be used for serving my own family, while the others took the two cans and ran home with them to their families. We dug rapidly now, the earth being still soft. To our surprise, the tops of the tins were located much nearer to the surface than we had supposed after our efforts of the morning to reach a great depth. The snow in which we had packed the cans had disappeared, but we made nothing of that. We drew out the cans, had off their tops, and gazed distressfully down into clear water. “It went and melted!” said Calista, resentfully. In a way, she regarded it as her personal failure, since the ceremony had been her suggestion in the first place. “Never mind, Calista,” we said, “you didn’t know.” Calista freely summed up her impressions. “How _mean_!” she said. We gravely gathered up the china plates and turned toward the house--and now I was possessed of a really accountable desire to get the plates back in their places as quickly as possible. On the way a thought struck us simultaneously. Poor Grandma Bard! “Let’s all go to see her to-morrow anyhow,” I suggested--largely, I am afraid, because the memory of my entertainment there was still fresh in my mind. When, after a little while, we came round the house where the older ones were sitting, and heard them discussing uninteresting affairs, we regarded them with real sympathy. They had so narrowly missed something so vastly, absorbingly interesting. From Delia’s room a voice came calling as, at intervals, other voices were heard calling other names throughout the neighbourhood--they were at one with the tinkle of the bells and the far-off yodel of the boys. “Delia!” “Good night,” said Delia, briefly, and vanished without warning, as at the sound of any other taps. Soon after, the others also disappeared; and I crept up on the porch and lay down in the hammock. “What’s she been doing _now_?” somebody instantly asked me. For a moment I thought of telling; but not seriously. Evidently they had not expected an answer, for they went on talking. “... yes, I had looked forward to it for a long while. Of course we had all counted on it. It was a great disappointment.” Somewhere in me the words echoed a familiar and recent emotion. So! They too had their disappointments ... even as we. Of course whatever this was could have been nothing like losing a fortune in melted snow. Still, I felt a new sympathy. Mother turned to me. “We are going to ask Grandma Bard to come to live with us,” she said. “Will you like that?” I sat up in the hammock. “All the time?” I joyfully inquired. “For the rest of the time,” Mother said soberly. “It seems as if one ought to take a child,” she added to the others, “when one takes anybody....” “Still,” said father, “till we get in our heads something of what the state owes to old folks, there’s nobody but us to do its work....”