by no means fresh, sat beside a roughly built table, peeling
tomatoes, her brown stained fingers moving with the rapidity of a
prestidigitator's. Judith stood beside her, also attacking the pile of
crimson fruit, endeavoring in vain to emulate her mother's speed. Over
the hot, rusty stove hung Arnold, red-faced and bright-eyed, armed
with a long, wooden spatula which he continually dug into the steaming
contents of an enormous white-lined kettle. As, at the arrival of
the new-comers, Mrs. Marshall's voice stopped, he looked around and
frowned impatiently at his stepmother. "She's just got to the excitin'
part," he said severely, and to the raconteur eagerly, "'N'_en_ what?"

Mrs. Marshall looked up at her husband's sister, smiled, and went
on,--Sylvia recognized the story as one of her own old favorites.
"Well, it was very early dawn when she had to go over to the
neighbor's to borrow some medicine for her father, who kept getting
sicker all the time. As she hurried along across the meadow towards
the stile, she kept wondering, in spite of herself, if there was any
truth in what Nat had said about having seen bear tracks near the
house the day before. When she got to the stile she ran up the
steps--and on the top one she stood still, for there--" She made
a dramatic pause and reached for another tray of tomatoes. Arnold
stopped stirring the pot and stood motionless, his eyes fixed on
the narrator, the spatula dripping tomato-juice all along his white
trousers. "There on the other side, looking up at her, was a bear--a
big black bear."

Arnold's mouth dropped open and his eyes widened.

"My grandmother was dreadfully frightened. She was only seventeen, and
she hadn't any kind of a weapon, not so much as a little stick with