“Shall I be big enough when I am six?”

“No, not till your eighteenth birthday.”

“But birthdays comes so slow. Will they come quicker when I am big?”

“Much quicker.”

On her sixth birthday Micah Dow drove my little maid to the school-house in the doctor’s gig, and she crept beneath the table and whispered—

374

“Grandfather!”

“Father told me to call you that if I liked, and I like,” she said when I had taken her upon my knee. “I know why you kissed me just now. It was because I looked like grandmother. Why do you kiss me when I look like her?”

“Who told you I did that?”

“Nobody didn’t tell me. I just found out. I loved grandmother too. She told me all the stories she knew.”