“Why, sis!” she said breathlessly. And then, to me, “It is the first time she has ever let me tell it.”

“He won’t laugh,” said the blind one—and therein voiced an affection for me of which I shall always be glad.

Do you wonder that I hastened her to her story? Perhaps you are glad that I am at last come to it. Yet all I have said belongs together if it were properly told.

Now attend!

V
HILIARY LOVED BOTH AND BOTH LOVED HIM

“In 1757,” the frail one began, “everything was different from what it is now—you can’t imagine how different. There was no money like our national bank-notes. The money of the United States was gold and silver coin. There was state money—‘shinplasters,’ they were called—and such things. But most of the money was the private notes of bankers, and no one ever knew whether they were good or bad. So they were always uncertain, and people who wanted money to keep would get it in gold or silver pieces. Sis and I had a little money from our mother’s estate—two thousand dollars each—and the teapot. They gave it to us in twenty-dollar gold pieces, mine of 1837, and sis’s of 1836—the dates of our birth. I think one could get them stamped at the Mint that way in those days. Anyhow, these came from the Philadelphia Mint.”

See how badly my old lady tells a story! She jumps straight from the coins to Hiliary.

“Sis and I never knew which of us Hiliary loved. He came to see us both—and, in fact, the whole family. And everybody liked him, and he liked everybody. But it seemed pretty certain that he would ask one of us to marry him. So sis and I (we were living here alone then—father having died the year before) laughingly considered that we would probably not need more than one trousseau (for Hiliary was the only beau we both had), and that we would put into the teapot all that we could spare for that purpose and not count it until Hiliary had asked one or the other of us—then she was to have it all. Whenever we had a levy or a fi’-penny-bit to spare, we would drop it into the teapot. Sis put in twice to my once, I am sure, because I had what they called a sweet tooth in my head, and brother Ben said that syrup water, which you could get at the groceries then, was the only thing that was good for it.”

The blind one stopped the story to explain something she thought was not plain to me:

“We thought we could only afford to have one wedding between us, you know.”