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Aunt Ann had laid down her work again, and was gazing into vistas of rich enjoyment.

“I’ll be whipped if I shouldn’t like to see that little still!”

“I’ll go up and bring it down after dinner,” said Amelia soberly, folding her work and taking off her thimble. “I’d just as soon as not.”

All through the dinner hour aunt Ann kept up an inspiring stream of question and reminiscence.

“You be a good cook, ‘Melia, an’ no mistake,” she remarked, breaking her brown hot biscuit. “This your same kind o’ bread, made without yeast?”

“Yes,” answered Amelia, pouring the tea. “I save a mite over from the last risin’.”

Aunt Ann smelled the biscuit critically. “Well, it makes proper nice bread,” she said, “but seems to me that’s a terrible shif’less way to go about it. However’d you happen to git hold on’t? You wa’n’t never brought up to’t.”

“His mother used to make it so. ‘T was no great trouble, and ‘t would have worried him if I’d changed.”

When the lavender-sprigged china had been washed and the hearth swept up, the room fell into its aspect of afternoon repose. The cat, after another serious ablution, sprang up into a chair drawn close to the fireplace, and coiled herself symmetrically on the faded patchwork cushion. Amelia stroked her in passing. She liked to see puss appropriate that chair; her purr from it renewed the message of domestic content.

“Now,” said Amelia, “I’ll get the still.”

“Bring down anything else that’s ancient!” called aunt Ann. “We’ve pretty much got red o’ such things over t’our house, but I kind o’ like to see ’em.”

When Amelia returned, she staggered under a miscellaneous burden: the still, some old swifts for winding yarn, and a pair of wool-cards.

“I don’t believe you know so much about cardin’ wool as I do,” she said, in some triumph, regarding the cards with the saddened gaze of one who recalls an occupation never to be resumed. “You see, you dropped all such work when new things come in. I kept right on because he wanted me to.”

Aunt Ann was abundantly interested and amused.

“Well, now, if ever!” she repeated over and over again. “If this don’t carry me back! Seems if I could hear the wheel hummin’ an’ gramma Balch steppin’ back an’ forth as stiddy as a clock. It’s been a good while sence I’ve thought o’ such old days.”

“If it’s old days you want”–began Amelia, and she sped upstairs with a fresh light of resolution in her eyes.

It was a long time before she returned,–so long that aunt Ann exhausted the still, and turned again to her thrifty knitting. Then there came a bumping noise on the stairs, and Amelia’s shuffling tread.

“What under the sun be you doin’ of?” called her aunt, listening, with her head on one side. “Don’t you fall, ‘Melia! Whatever’t is, I can’t help ye.”

But the stairway door yielded to pressure from within: and first a rim of wood appeared, and then Amelia, scarlet and breathless, staggering under a spinning-wheel.

“Forever!” ejaculated aunt Ann, making one futile effort to rise, like some cumbersome fowl whose wings are clipped. “My land alive! you’ll break a blood-vessel, an’ then where’ll ye be?”

Amelia triumphantly drew the wheel to the middle of the floor, and then blew upon her dusty hands and smoothed her tumbled hair. She took off her apron and wiped the wheel with it rather tenderly, as if an ordinary duster would not do.

“There!” she said. “Here’s some rolls right here in the bedroom. I carded them myself, but I never expected to spin any more.”

She adjusted a roll to the spindle, and, quite forgetting aunt Ann, began stepping back and forth in a rhythmical march of feminine service. The low hum of her spinning filled the air, and she seemed to be wrapped about by an atmosphere of remoteness and memory. Even aunt Ann was impressed by it; and once, beginning to speak, she looked at Amelia’s face, and stopped. The purring silence continued, lulling all lesser energies to sleep, until Amelia, pausing to adjust her thread, found her mood broken by actual stillness, and gazed about her like one awakened from dreams.