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Charlotte in a dainty white cap was pitiful, but Harriet was both pitiful and comical. They were totally at variance with their surroundings, and they felt it keenly, as people of their stamp always do. No amount of kindness and attention – and they had enough of both – sufficed to reconcile them to their new abode. Charlotte pleaded continually with her sister to go back to their old home.

“O Lord, Harriét,” she would exclaim (by the way, Charlotte’s “O Lord,” which, as she used it, was innocent enough, had been heard with much disfavor in the “Home,” and she, not knowing at all why, had been remonstrated with concerning it), “let us go home. I can’t stay here no ways in this world. I don’t like their vittles, an’ I don’t like to wear a cap; I want to go home and do different. The currants will be ripe, Harriét. O Lord, thar was almost a chink, thinking about ’em. I want some of ’em; an’ the Porter apples will be gittin’ ripe, an’ we could have some apple-pie. This here ain’t good; I want merlasses fur sweeting. Can’t we get back no ways, Harriét?It ain’t far, an’ we could walk, an’ they don’t lock us in, nor nothin’. I don’t want to die her; it ain’t so straight up to heaven from here. O Lord, I’ve felt as if I was slantendicular from heaven ever since I’ve been here, an’ it’s been so awful dark. I ain’t had any chinks. I want to go home, Harriét.”

“We’ll go to-morrow mornin’,” said Harriet, finally; “we’ll pack up our things an’ go; we’ll put on our old dresses, an’ we’ll do up the new ones in bundles, an’ we’ll jest shy out the back way to-morrow mornin’; an’ we’ll go. I kin find the way, an’ I reckon we kin git thar, if it is fourteen mile. Mebbe somebody will give us a lift.”

And they went. With a grim humor Harriet hung the new white lace caps with which she and Charlotte had been so pestered, one on each post at the head of the bedstead, so they would meet the eyes of the first person who opened the door. Then they took their bundles, stole slyly out, and were soon on the high-road, hobbling along, holding each other’s hands, as jubilant as two children, and chuckling to themselves over their escape, and the probable astonishment there would be in the “Home” over it.

“O Lord, Harriét, what do you s’pose they will say to them caps?” cried Charlotte, with a gleeful cackle.

“I guess they’ll see as folks ain’t goin’ to be made to wear caps agin their will in a free kentry,” returned Harriet, with an echoing cackle, as they sped feebly and bravely along.

The “Home” stood on the very outskirts of the city, luckily for them. They would have found it a difficult undertaking to traverse the crowded streets. As it was, a short walk brought them into the free country road – free comparatively, for even here at ten o’clock in the morning there was considerable travelling to and from the city on business or pleasure.

People whom they met on the road did not stare at them as curiously as might have been expected. Harriet held her bristling chin high in air, and hobbled along with an appearance of being well aware of what she was about, that led folks to doubt their own first opinion that there was something unusual about the two old women.

Still their evident feebleness now and then occasioned from one and another more particular scrutiny. When they had been on the road a half-hour or so, a man in a covered wagon drove up behind them. After he had passed them, he poked his head around the front of the vehicle and looked back. Finally he stopped, and waited for them to come up to him.