"La, child, you don't say so," said Aunt Jane, turning over the parcels in her lap and hurriedly counting them. "Why, no we ain't. Here's the soda and the cream o' tartar and the gyarden seed all right."
"But you forgot to tell me the story of the house that was a wedding fee," said I with dramatic solemnity.
"Now did anybody ever!" laughed Aunt Jane. "Skeerin' me to death about a old yarn like that! Well, honey, that story's sixty years old already, and I reckon it'll keep a little longer yet. Some o' these days I'll tell you the story of that old house. I reckon I owe you another story for takin' me to town and bringin' me home so nice. I'm mighty glad I've seen the old place once more, for the next time I go to town maybe I'll go in the direction of the New Jerusalem."
After Nelly had been unharnessed and fed, I sat down on the porch to watch the passing of day. Ah! surely it is worth while to go to town now and then just for the pleasure of getting back to the country, to its purer air, its solitude, its blessed stillness. I lifted up my eyes unto the hills and let the sunset and the twilight hold me in their spells till Aunt Jane's voice called me in with a warning of the danger that lurks in falling dew; and when I closed my eyes in sleep that night, my brain was a panorama of strange scenes. Past and present were mingled, as a picture painted within a picture, for, through Aunt Jane's eyes, I, too, had seen double. I had gone to town over the old 'pike, but I had also traveled the road of dead years, and it had led me into the Land of Long Ago.