“Your grandmother and I brought those trees here. They were twigs then, and she was a bride. I brought her here some years after I took my claim. Now her grave is there, and the graves of two of our own little ones. I shall come back again. You and my sister Susan are all that is left me now,—just old Susan and young Susan. _She_ needs me. _He_ will take care of you. If I live a week, I am going to rocky old New England once more. I hear voices calling me sometimes, and then there drifts into the air that last song of the robin, peculiarsome like.” “What were the letters you hid behind the board, grandpa?” “In the haunted garret?” “Yes.” “I may tell you sometime. It is a long story. It was in the garret where I once saw the ghost of old Rachel, who ground red peppers with a calash over her head. They used to hear her wandering about at night in the herb-room, pounding, pounding, pounding with a pestle. What times those were!” “I, too, would like to see the old house, and my great-aunt, and eat a Thanksgiving dinner with some of the good old families. What do you say, grandpa?” “You would? Well, you may go too. You’ll hear them, all those ghost-stories and wonder-tales, right where they happened.” The girl’s face brightened up with pleasure, followed by a doubtful shadow, as of ghostly thoughts. She was still thinking of the haunted garret. The old man sat dreaming again. He at last said, “Susan!” “Yes.” “Susan!” “Yes, I am listening.” “I have a secret for you.” “Yes? Let me hear.” “We will not let the folks know that we are coming. We will meet ’em as strangers like. Old Susan will not know me—likely not. Not know _me_? and we were born on the same day and rocked in the same cradle. It takes two to be happy always, and I used to be happy with her.” The girl sat thinking. “Grandpa!” But the old man’s mind was in New England now. He was listening in dreams to his sister’s voice, and perhaps the last song of the robin. “Grandpa!” “Yes, Susan.” “Why could we not bring _her_ back with us?” “The old well is there, and the walls and the rooms where the folks all were married and died. We could not bring her back. There are some things that money cannot do. We might bring her body back; only that, Susan.” “But those things are to be sold?” “Yes; but they are there.” “And we will be there too, on Thanksgiving Day.” “Yes; under the old roof on which I used to hear the rain fall in the warm summer eves.” The old man’s face contracted and turned away. He was crying. “I have not cried before for years, Susan. Sing me that old song that your mother used to sing when you was a baby. They called it ‘Ben Bolt.’” A piano stood in one corner of the room, and over it soon floated the words of the haunting song: “Oh, don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt, Sweet Alice, whose hair was so brown?”