And some of those ancestors had made this ancient and battered chest of drawers which had crossed the salt ocean and the plains and been pierced by a bullet in the fight with the Indians at Little Meadow.

Almost, it seemed, she could visualize the women who had kept their pretties and their family homespun in its drawers--the women of those wandering generations who were grandmothers and greater great grandmothers of her own mother.

Well, she sighed, it was a good stock to be born of, a hard-working, hard-fighting stock.

She fell to wondering what her life would have been like had she been born a Chinese woman, or an Italian woman like those she saw, head-shawled or bareheaded, squat, ungainly and swarthy, who carried great loads of driftwood on their heads up from the beach.

Then she laughed at her foolishness, remembered Billy and the four-roomed cottage on Pine Street, and went to bed with her mind filled for the hundredth time with the details of the furniture..