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6 Worth Womans While Some Old Neighbors. E see in this day of fad and fashion few figures that approach to Miss Jinnie’s. A couple of decades behind the prevail ing mode in dress, her mother’s silks were of even earlier date, but Mrs. Ash, being “an old lady,” unmistakably and undeniably—for twenty years ago there were old ladies, little as the spirit of the present time may comprehend it— W it was not so noticeable; the more that for a good part of the year they were pretty well concealed by the shawl she wore folded to reach well down behind in a point, and to lie comforta bly in her lap in two other points, as she sat dur ing the sermon with her little fat hands clasped, and the strings of her bonnet pinned neatly under her chin. Church was the only place Mrs. Ash was ever known to go. Mrs. Parker’s shawl was folded in a point, too, and came almost to her heels where her little black and-tan terrier. Jack, trotted behind, the only dif ference being that where Mrs. Ash’s shawl was silk, hers was wool. It was like the difference be tween the two houses—Mrs. Barker’s was one-story and unpainted, and opened immediately on the street, while Miss Jinnie’s sat somewhat back in the shade, was two-story and had once known a coat of red and white. The house was Miss Jinnie’s own, left her by her husband who had been dead many years, and was always spoken of as having been a “peculiar man”—one of the peculiarities oftenest cited being that on arising from a night’s rest the first article of apparel donned was his hat. Mrs. Ash was only her mother—a short, placid lit tle lady contented to walk demurely by the side of the tall daughter who always reminded Clarissa of a hollyhock, straight, unbending stem and pink bloom at the top—Miss Jinnie’s complexion was a marvel till Clarissa discovered the secret behind the sunbonnet she wore when about her household duties—namely, flour paste spread over her face. Between her and Mrs. Barker lay that lady’s gar den, so that any passage of words which might be necessary became an easy matter over the fence. On the other side of Mrs. Barker ran a lane leading to the cemetery, across which were the syringas and bridal wreaths of the Brewtons—Mr. Brewton, Mrs. Brewton and Clarissa—and it was only a grass lot that divided us from them, which is irrelevant, but going to explain our proximity to a goodly company of choice spirits, the like of which is not seen in this day of sameness in patterns. We lived there, as the nursery rhyme says, “Silver bells and cockle shells, and little maids all in a row”—in front of us on a little green rise the old church with its Corinthian pillars where birds nested and made merry, and, in what might have been to some, grue some nearness to the cedars and gray-gleaming stones of the cemetery visible from our back doors. We did not so regard it. Clarissa did not. Yet a child at sixteen, no inmate of her little world was dull or uninteresting. Her father’s regular visits on Sunday to Mrs. Ash and Miss Jinnie were as vital in interest to her and in the mild gossip passed, as any events in her never-lonely life. “Pa and Mrs. Ash like to sit and talk—two old folks together,” the girl would say. As to Miss Jinnie’s age, I don’t suppose anybody ever before thought of age in connection with her pretty, round face and shining dark hair; she never grew older. Mrs. Brewton had been all Clarissa’s life bedrid den; so it was that Mr. Brewton found it incumbent upon him to return to the two ladies the frequent and neighborly visits to his wife made by Miss Jinnie at any time during the week, and in his turn always on Sunday; it was to him diversion, yet perfectly godly; being a classleader he sought nat urally the company of the elect. Armed in summer with a palm-leaf fan, and in winter wrapped in the great cloth cape which made him look in Clarissa’s eyes like an old Boman Senator, he sallied forth The Golden Age for September 27, 1906. By FLORENCE TUCKER followed by the girl’s loving gaze; though she called him old in view of his sixty odd, to her he never was so. It was often about the same hour that Mrs. Barker would come in for a Sunday chat with Mrs. Brewton, when that lady would lay aside her glasses and listen, gen uinely absorbed in the precision of her neighbor’s remarks. Mrs. Barker had away when speaking with unction of closing her lips at the corners and articulating with her head on one side and an as sumption of unusualness, which (it was the only affectation ever known to her, if even it might be called such) must have been really becoming, for nobody ever thought of criticising it. Indeed, there would have been little satisfaction in doing so, for nothing so throws ridicule back upon itself as the indifference of the object at which it is aimed, and Mrs. Barker was above petty meannesses. The only times she was ever known to descend to the level of bickering humanity were when her chick ens were found straying in Miss Jinnie’s unused garden. Standing on her side the fence, encased in sunbonnet and gloves, Miss Jinnie’s voice with its unmistakable note of aggressiveness would call out: “Mrs. Barker! Oh, Mrs. Barker!” when that personage would bob out of her roasting-ear patch, or rise up from the ground where she had been weeding. “Your chickens are in my garden!” “Well, I don’t guess they have hurt anything— there’s nothing there,” would come with some as perity. Whereupon Miss Jinnie would respond: “If I wanted chickens on my place I’d have some of my own,” and words would ensue; Miss Jinnie thereafter marching with sunbonnet erect into the house fb go over the rencontre with “Ma,” and Mrs. Barker going back to her work with a renewed energy which bespoke determination; or, if it chanc ed to occur on a Saturday morning any time before ten o’clock, arming herself with rake and an old straw broom she would take her way out the lane to the cemetery. On one of these occasions Claris sa sat, as she had often done before, on the back porch, “Mother.” she called to the invalid lying within, “has Mrs. Barker been going to the cemetery every Saturday morning since the flood?” “Oh, no!” came the reply, “only since the war. ’ ’ “Was Mr. Barker killed in the war?” “No, he was marshal of the town just after the war, and was shot in a negro riot while attempting to maintain the peace.” “Well, that picture she has on his tombstone is of a man in a soldier’s uniform, and a very good looking man, too.” “Yes, that was taken during the war; it’s curious how it has stayed there so many years with only that glass to protect it.” “Well, mother, let me tell you!” cried Clarissa, rising and going in. “You know the Naylor baby’s grave? The last time I was over there somebody had broken the glass that holds all those little things, and taken the jet-and-gold necklace and cross! The little shoes and broken toys the child had were all there, and looking as if about to crum ble away, but the necklace was gone.” “Well, they’ve been there a long time—as long almost as Mr. Barker’s picture.” “How did he ever come to marry her anyway, mother?” laughed Clarissa. “It is so funny to think of Mrs. Barker having a lover and being mar ried.” “Why, you know in the war times the women made up clothing and knitted socks, and fixed boxes of all the comforts that could be procured, to send to the soldiers. They all got together and packed them, and some of the girls put their names on the articles they had made. Merlin Stone was one who did; and when the things with her name, all neatly made and suggestive of womanly kindness, fell to Mr. Barker, I suppose he thought a good deal about it, Certainly after the close of the war he sought her out, and they were married, but soon afterward he was killed and she has lived there alone ever since except for her roomers, and a good deal of the time the rooms have not been taken. They must have been lonely years.” “Just with Jack and Becky,” said Clarissa. 1 ‘ Yes, her dog and her cow have been a great deal to her—and to us—for where would my little girl have gotten the milk for her coffee but for old Becky?” said Mrs. Brewton, settling her glasses and resuming her paper. Clarissa picked one leaf after another from the pomegranite bush which spread up over the window sill. She was thinking of Mrs. Barker’s faithful and loving care of Becky. No stall was more comfortable; dry and warm in winter, it was in roughest weather the creature was most in the thought of her mistress; and in summer the sweet est of pasturage was hers, the garden contributing forage and at certain seasons grazing, at which times she deported herself with the dignity of one coming into her own. Becky was always a mild mannered cow, and accepted with the appreciation of understanding the kindness of her lot. If her affection was not expressed as demonstratively as was Jack’s, she had not the same privilege of near ness, and then, it was not her way; Jack was of a vivacious temperament, and he was constantly with his mistress, even trotting cheerfully behind as she reached her seat in the amen corner on Sundays, and conducting his nap throughout the sermon with the utmost decorum. “Jack’s got enough better church manners than Miss Jinnie Stamp or old Mrs. Ash, either,” said Vinnie, the sexton’s little daughter, to Clarissa one day. “She needn’t to think I’d go to that little old school she’s er teachin’ in that house in her yard! Pa isays he’d be afraid some judgment would come on us, like ’twill on her some day. Why, what do you think?’ she shook her finger in Clarissa’s face with the very look of an embryo prohpet'ess—(“When me and Lida sweeps the church out after ev’ry Sacrament Sunday, there’s the Sacrament bread where Miss Jinnie and Mrs. Ash throwed it down when they went back to their seats! You know that tombstone what won’t set up straight, and the top of it’s done fell off and nobody can’t make it stay on?”—she continued, growing pale and rigid with superstition. “The young man that’s buried there walked straight from the Sacrament table and fed the bread to a dog, and that young man fell dead at the church door! You know it! There, Miss Jinnie and Mrs. Ash throwed that bread down—Jack could have eat it, but he had too much manners to do it!” If Mrs. Barker shared in Vinnie’s sentiments as to the respective respectability of her neighbors and her dog, she was less open in their expression, though, as she walked the earthly way, she had to confess to herself Miss Jinnie was the thorn in her flesh. She was sitting one afternoon smarting un der a recent conflict when Clarissa came in to bring the last week’s Advocate and get an extra pound of butter. Going out into the kitchen so absorbed she was in weighing out the butter her ear failed to note the approach or entrance of a man at the open door way. Clarissa did not at first notice him, either; she was thinking of the young soldier whose grate ful heart had led him to find love and home with the matter-of-fact, kindly little woman whose prosaic life was so little suggestive of sentiment. But then she had been young, and, no doubt, softer; she fell to conjuring up the sort of girl Mrs. Barker must have been, as her eyes went over with renewed in terest each old-fashioned article about the room, the tester bed with its curious little railing around the top that must have been so nice with the cur iqnop on ipiqAt puords opipv put? quid aip pur her own hands had woven in those early days; and there on the mantel shelf the tall, queer clock like none Clarissa had ever seen, and hanging above it the picture of a man in a little round frame, (Concluded next week.)