know. My own growth has been struggling. I don't care for bridge or clubs; I am not interested in politics. This spring I have taken to tramping the woods with field-glasses and bird guides, and to planting choke-cherries and barberry in my garden. I have put in a lot of time, pleasantly, that way.

On my neighbor's barn is a rusty old weathercock that has always pointed north. There was a bad storm last night, and this morning the weathercock is turning in every direction-groping, bewildered. The thing that held it so long has broken. I feel rather sorry for it. In time, I suppose, it will get used to turning. Just now it seems a little dizzy.

I know how it feels. I think, too, I know at last about Old Jane's zinnias.

Every one wondered why Old Jane, that spring twenty-five years ago, started to grow flowers; not a bed of zinnias, as most folks grow them, a background for fragrant and less intense flowers, but a riot of zinnias: all about the house and around the vegetable garden; up the steep hillside back of the house to flare like irregular slaps of paint against the green woods; and clear down to the road-orange and red and yellow in all tints and shadings, like spilled rainbows.

I couldn't have been much more than fifteen the first summer of the zinnias, and I remember telling mother about them and saying that it must have rained zinnia seed on Old Jane's place, as the poet says about roses. I added too, as fifteen would, that a few zinnias in a copper bowl were really quite artistic; but all zinniasnothing but zinnias-impossible! They slapped you in the face. They screamed at you. You could do nothing but stop and stare.

And every one did. Even now I can remember the feeling they gave me. I still like zinnias-a few in a copper bowl. I like sunflowers, too, their round bonneted faces peeping over a wall. But I should not like an entire garden of sunflowers.

Anyhow, zinnias and Old Jane Crowe didn't go together, and it was hard for me to change my picture of her. I had always connected her with revivals.

You may not know revivals. They are old-fashioned. But we had them in Stony

Valley, and people looked forward to them, winter after winter, much as the city music-lover looks forward to his opera. They were the high light in a shaded picture.

We went. Every one did except my father, a lawyer, who could not find a personal place for them in his logical mind, and my mother, a New Englander, neither emotional nor orthodox. Mother's father, a minister, had changed churches and creeds with the greatest ease when his congregation had objected to his dealing in cattle as a side-line. So orthodoxy and revivals did not run in the family, and I was slightly contemptuous of them, and of shouting and of Old Jane.

I was a little afraid of her as a child and used to scamper through the gate when I saw her coming up the steep hill road that began with our house as Main Street and went on past the grocery and the courthouse and the blacksmith's shop in the bend of Stony River, there to become road again and wander through scattered houses back into the hills.

Old Jane's home, not far from the blacksmith's shop, was a dilapidated two-room cottage, almost hidden from sight by lilacs and mock oranges so tall and so rank that the upper sashes of the windows seemed like furtive eyes peering out over their tops. Between the lilacs and the road was a long open stretch sloping down to the river, that, before the zinnias, was a tangled mass of clover and blue grass and clumps of yellow daisies. Old Jane lived alone, an unsocial creature with a wrinkled brown face and eyes so dark that the pupil merged with the iris into a smoky expressionless whole. She was very small, and she wore long skirts that trailed, muddy, in the back, and over her head a light-colored shawl that threw her dark face into unpleasant relief. I don't know how she managed to live. She wove rag rugs that people bought sometimes, but that couldn't have kept her. She had chickens, but so did every one else. Some said she had relatives in Virginia who sent her money. Maybe she did. None of them ever showed up in Stony Valley.

She came to town rarely: Saturdays, with a basket of eggs to trade at the stores; Sundays, to sit at the rear of the

shabby, and she had no friends. What did she get out of church, anyhow?

But I had forgotten the revivals. It's strange how church services stick in our memories: spring Sundays with the windows open, daffodils by the pulpit, a lost bee darting about and angrily blaming every one for his own blunder; and perhaps a song-sparrow so close to the window that the voice of the minister is accompanied by spasmodic tinkles of music; winter nights, during a revival; every seat filled and rows of boys standing

you have seen one, all right. If you haven't, you can't understand how the evangelist, with his fear of God and his threats of eternal punishment, usually by fire, and his stories of sinners cut off in the flower of their sin-how all this can rouse a crowd to the point of hysteria. But it can. Even the songs, monotonous, almost chanted, help. You have to see it to understand. The tension either breaks or eases. When it eases there's a dull spot. It always comes, sometimes early, sometimes late.

It was for this spot that Old Jane waited. She did wait. Night after night passed and she sat motionless. I know, for I kept an uneasy eye upon her so I could slip farther over in the seat when she started down the aisle. I did not like shouting. It had become one of the lost arts in our community, with every one but Old Jane. People used to do it, father said, but they didn't any more. It terrified me as a child. It disgusted me as I grew older, and I never lost my distrust of an aisle seat as long as Old Jane shouted. I felt that I could not stay where she might touch me; that I could not have endured even the brush of her clothes as she passed.

It was much the same feeling as that I now have about the insane. Pity-yes; but more an intangible sensation of helplessness. Have you ever tried to talk over a telephone when the wire is down? That is the feeling. The invisible lines reaching out from you to them will no longer carry a message. There is no contact. You know-that quick flash when another mind meets yours, silently sometimes. Just contact.

I

I felt that way about her then. don't believe I should now. Looking back, I am sure that the lack of contact was in me, not her.

Old Jane was not an ordinary shouter. I realized that. She did not scream nor wring her hands nor make a fool of herself generally. I can't tell you just how she did it, but there was a difference; a touch of drama, perhaps, instead of hysteria; unsuspected richness of voice; and when she had finished, a hush, like that which follows the big scene in the second act of a play.

I can see her now, walking up and down the aisles, her eyes like banked coals glow without flame her face lighted somehow, inside, as when a lamp shines through a drawn blind. You have seen houses like that: blinds down, lights inside. Maybe you have walked slowly past, wondering who lives there and what they are doing behind the blinds. Perhaps you have painted a picture of them nicer than the one they actually make.

Well that was Old Jane. I feel now that she did not see us, packed tight in the hot room; that she followed a sort of

mirage reflected from some unknown oasis in her own character, and that following it she gained something we did not see. Perhaps I am wrong. It is easy to imagine things so long after.

It was disappointing that she did not stay that way. I did not like her shouting, but it seemed to suit her better than the drab shawl and the basket of eggs. Surfaces so rarely fit. The cat-bird hides a fighter's soul beneath his modest suit of Quaker gray, and the scarlet tanager, who loves deep woods and quiet, flaunts a crimson jacket with bold black sleeves.

I thought it a very good idea when the new minister announced one Sunday that instead of the usual revival there would be sermons by himself and special music by the choir. Of course it caused a row in the church, and a few of the members went over to the Baptists. It was discussed in the grocery-store and argued on the street corners. There was a meeting of the church-members and talk of asking the young minister to resign. But it was his first charge and they didn't.

I agreed with him entirely. I had just joined the choir. It did not worry me that so many of the old members left. Their ideas did not affect me. Neither had my mother's when I had insisted on new furniture for the living-room. As I said before, I was fifteen, the age of replacement, and by some strange transformation all the things I knew intimately had become cheap and tawdry. I had grown up with revivals just as I had with the living-room furniture, and it was proper that both should go.

I did not think of Old Jane. She had been little but a shadow to most of us, anyhow. So when she quit coming to church few missed her. I thought she showed good sense. There was to be no revival. She couldn't shout during a sermon with special music by the choir. Shouting was all she did. Why come?

That spring was the beginning of the zinnias, and they were a sensation.

Did you ever come suddenly upon a gorgeous moth slowly waving his newgrown wings in the sunshine? A luxurious velvet creature just out of the drab cocoon that has hung by your door all winter? Then you know how we felt about the zinnias.

We like moths better if we have watched them come out of their cocoons; their beauty is so startling, and it ties them up, somehow, with reality. Cocoons, you can handle. Moth wings lose their velvet when you touch them.

It says much for Old Jane that no one asked her about the zinnias. Instead we strolled past with quick self-conscious glances, avoiding a direct look at the window where the curtains moved and parted. When the church gave a social for new members the wife of the Sundayschool superintendent suggested that some one go and ask Old Jane for some of her zinnias to bank about the altar-rail. But she did not offer to go herself, and there were no volunteers. The rail was decorated with golden-glow.

We did not talk about it, but I think there was a general relief when the frost came and took the zinnias. There were so many of them.

I suppose I was not the only one who watched for them the next spring, though no one mentioned it. Thinking of the zinnias I watched for Old Jane too, and came to realize that I had not seen her for weeks. I mentioned this to my mother and her New England conscience suggested that I walk to school past Old Jane's house and look for her. And though there was a sharp wind cutting through the sunshine and waving the new green of the willows along the river, there was no smoke coming from Old Jane's chimney.

I went home, too, by way of the river. The wind took my breath as I passed the blacksmith's shop, and still there was no smoke from Old Jane's chimney. I didn't stop to decide what I should do. If I had stopped I should not have done anything. I opened the gate that hung sagging on one hinge, walked up the path between the dead zinnias, and knocked at the door.

I had to go in finally without an answer, and I remember that the ice frozen between the door and the step cracked and gave suddenly as I pushed against the knob. The room was almost dark, and I stood for a minute, my heart pounding, while the things about me took shape and moved out a little from the dusk that blurred them: a table, draped with an old

chenille cover tapestried in birds and roses; a low rocker; a chest of drawers by the window; and in the darkest corner a bed with Old Jane huddled upon it.

She was too sick to resent me, but her eyes were unfriendly, and they followed me back and forth as I dragged wood from the lean-to kitchen and worked clumsily to start a blaze in the fireplace. It was the only thing I knew how to do, and the house was so cold.

I ran all the way home, looking back over my shoulder, rushed into the kitchen, and locked the door safely behind me. I was glad afterward that there had been no one in the kitchen to see me.

Father walked out the road after supper and sent "Doc" Andrews over to Old Jane's. He came back in less than an hour and he and mother talked for a long time in the living-room. I heard him say impatiently that some one would have to look after her, as she had no folks, and when mother came out and started to pack a basket, I knew that the some one was going to be mother. That is one of the penalties for having a New England conscience. Mother did not care a rap, personally, for Old Jane, but she did care for her responsibilities.

From that evening mother and I took care of her: swept the old rag carpet and washed the curtains; scrubbed the kitchen and put clean newspapers on the cupboard shelves; and I every morning on my way to school, brought a basket of food and set it on a chair by Old Jane's bed. If she noticed and appreciated our trouble she did not show it. She was quite helpless. As for me, propinquity had changed her, as it does most ogresses, into a weak and harmless old woman, and all my fear of her had died in that first terrified evening.

At first I was impatient at the bother she caused me, and wondered why some one else couldn't help take care of herthe wife of the Sunday-school superintendent, who talked so much of her religion, or even Miss Oliver, my teacher. When I complained to mother, she just looked at me, and I didn't mention it any more.

As the days passed and the willows grew greener and lacier along the banks of the river, I stopped at Old Jane's every