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She then took Hannah’s basket and placed it on the window-sill overlooking the vacant lot, explaining that she used its contents to fling at dogs, cats and birds below.

“It makes a little extra work for Hannah,” she commented. “But it’s making a new woman of her. It would be good for you, too, Lizzie. There’s nothing like bending over to reduce the abdomen.”

But Aggie, having come to mourn, proceeded to do it.

“To think,” she said, “that if they had only made it a day later, dear Charlie would have been exempt. It’s too tragic, Tish.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Tish in a cold tone. “He does not have to register. He was born at seven in the morning, June fifth.”

“In the evening, Tish,” said Aggie gently. “I was there, you know, and I remember—-“

Tish gave her a terrible look.

“Of course you would know,” she observed, icily. “But as I was in the room, and recall distinctly going out and telling old Amanda, the cook, about breakfast—-“

“Supper,” said Aggie firmly. “You were excited, naturally. But I was in the hall when you came out, and I was expecting my first gentleman caller, which no girl ever forgets, Tish. I remember that Amanda was hooking my dress, which was very tight, because we had waist lines in those days and I wanted—-“

“Aggie,” Tish thundered, “he was born early in the morning of June fifth. He will be thirty-two years of age early in the morning of Registration day. And if he tries to register I shall be on hand with the facts.”

Well, whether she was right or not, she was convinced that she was, and it is useless to argue with her under those circumstances. Luckily she heard a dog in the lot just then, and threw down a broken bottle and some bricks at him, and the woman in the apartment below raised a window and threatened to report her to the Humane Society. But, as usual, Tish was more than her equal.

“Come right up, then,” she said. “Because I am a member of the Humane Society and have been for twenty years. I consider throwing bricks at that dog as patriotic a duty as killing a German, any day.”

Here, by accident, the basket slid off the window-sill, and Tish closed the window violently.

“It hit her on the head,” she said, in what I fear was an exultant tone. “I wouldn’t have done it on purpose, but I guess it’s no sin to be thankful.”

Because the incident I am about to relate concerns not only Registration Day, but also Mr. Culver and the secret in the barn, I have been some time in getting to it. And if, in so doing, I have reflected at any time either on Tish’s patriotism or her strict veracity, I am sorry. No one who knows Tish can doubt either.

In spite of Aggie, in spite of Charlie Sands, who protested violently that he distinctly remembered being born in the evening, because he had yelled all the ensuing night and no one had had a wink of sleep–in spite of all this, Tish remained firm in her conviction that 7 A. M. on Registration Day, when the precincts opened, would find him too old to register.

On the surface the days that followed passed uneventfully. Tish sewed and knitted, and once each day stood Aggie and myself on the outskirts of her garden and pointed out things which she said would be green corn, and tomatoes and peppers and so on. But there was a set look about her face, to those of us who knew and loved her. She had moments of abstraction, too, and during one of them weeded out an entire row of spring onions, according to Hannah.

On the third of June I went into the jeweller’s to have my watch regulated, and found Tish at the counter. She muttered something about a main spring and went out, leaving me staring after her. I am no idiot, however, although not Tish’s mental equal by any means, and I saw that she had been looking at gentlemen’s gold watches.