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I glanced at the resolute, confident face of my companion. Life was very strong in her, as if some force of Nature were personified in this simple-hearted woman and gave her cousinship to the ancient deities. She might have walked the primeval fields of Sicily; her strong gingham skirts might at that very moment bend the slender stalks of asphodel and be fragrant with trodden thyme, instead of the brown wind-brushed grass of New England and frost-bitten goldenrod. She was a great soul, was Mrs. Todd, and I her humble follower, as we went our way to visit the Queen’s Twin, leaving the bright view of the sea behind us, and descending to a lower country-side through the dry pastures and fields.

The farms all wore a look of gathering age, though the settlement was, after all, so young. The fences were already fragile, and it seemed as if the first impulse of agriculture had soon spent itself without hope of renewal. The better houses were always those that had some hold upon the riches of the sea; a house that could not harbor a fishing-boat in some neighboring inlet was far from being sure of every-day comforts. The land alone was not enough to live upon in that stony region; it belonged by right to the forest, and to the forest it fast returned. From the top of the hill where we had been sitting we had seen prosperity in the dim distance, where the land was good and the sun shone upon fat barns, and where warm-looking houses with three or four chimneys apiece stood high on their solid ridge above the bay.

As we drew nearer to Mrs. Martin’s it was sad to see what poor bushy fields, what thin and empty dwelling-places had been left by those who had chosen this disappointing part of the northern country for their home. We crossed the last field and came into a narrow rain-washed road, and Mrs. Todd looked eager and expectant and said that we were almost at our journey’s end. “I do hope Mis’ Martin ‘ll ask you into her best room where she keeps all the Queen’s pictures. Yes, I think likely she will ask you; but ‘t ain’t everybody she deems worthy to visit ’em, I can tell you!” said Mrs. Todd warningly. “She ‘s been collectin’ ’em an’ cuttin’ ’em out o’ newspapers an’ magazines time out o’ mind, and if she heard of anybody sailin’ for an English port she ‘d contrive to get a little money to ’em and ask to have the last likeness there was. She ‘s most covered her best-room wall now; she keeps that room shut up sacred as a meetin’-house! ‘I won’t say but I have my favorites amongst ’em,’ she told me t’ other day, ‘but they ‘re all beautiful to me as they can be!’ And she’s made some kind o’ pretty little frames for ’em all–you know there’s always a new fashion o’ frames comin’ round; first ‘t was shell-work, and then ‘t was pine-cones, and bead-work’s had its day, and now she ‘s much concerned with perforated cardboard worked with silk. I tell you that best room’s a sight to see! But you must n’t look for anything elegant,” continued Mrs. Todd, after a moment’s reflection. “Mis’ Martin’s always been in very poor, strugglin’ circumstances. She had ambition for her children, though they took right after their father an’ had little for themselves; she wa’n’t over an’ above well married, however kind she may see fit to speak. She’s been patient an’ hard-workin’ all her life, and always high above makin’ mean complaints of other folks. I expect all this business about the Queen has buoyed her over many a shoal place in life. Yes, you might say that Abby ‘d been a slave, but there ain’t any slave but has some freedom.”

IV.

Presently I saw a low gray house standing on a grassy bank close to the road. The door was at the side, facing us, and a tangle of snowberry bushes and cinnamon roses grew to the level of the window-sills. On the doorstep stood a bent-shouldered, little old woman; there was an air of welcome and of unmistakable dignity about her.