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Page 10
Mrs Slater, having left Hilton but recently, was able to explain just
what had been removed, replaced, or altered subsequent to Miss
Ludington's flight. The general appearance of the old street, Mrs. Slater
said, remained much the same, despite the changes which had driven Miss
Ludington away; but new streets had been opened up, and the population of
the village had trebled, and become largely foreign.
In their slow progress they came at last to the school-house.
The door was ajar, and they entered on tiptoe, like tardy scholars. With
a glance of mutual intelligence they hung their hats, each on the one of
the row of wooden pegs in the entry, which had been hers as a
school-girl, and through the open door entered the silent school-room and
sat down in the self-same seats in which two maidens, so unlike them, yet
linked to them by so strangely tender a tie, had reigned as school-room
belles nearly half a century before. In hushed voices, with moist eyes;
and faces shining with the light of other days, those grey-haired women
talked together of the scenes which that homely old room had witnessed,
the long-silent laughter, and the voices, no more heard on earth, with
which it had once echoed.
There in the corner stood a great wrought-iron stove, the counterpart of
the one around whose red-hot sides they had shivered, in their short
dresses, on cold winter mornings. On the walls hung the quaint maps of
that period whence they had received geographical impressions, strangely
antiquated now. Along one side of the room ran a black-board, on which
they had been wont to demonstrate their ignorance of algebra and geometry
to the complete satisfaction of the master, while behind them as they sat
was a row of recitation benches, associated with so many a trying ordeal
of school-girl existence.
"Do you ever think where the girls are in whose seats we are sitting?"
said Mrs. Slater, musingly. "I can remember myself as a girl, more or
less distinctly, and can even be sentimental about her; but it doesn't
seem to me that I am the same person at all; I can't realize it."
"Of course you can't realize it. Why should you expect to realize what is
not true?" replied Miss Ludington.
"But I am the same person," responded Mrs. Slater.
Miss Ludington regarded her with a smile.
"You have kept your looks remarkably, my dear," she said. "You did not
lose them all at once, as I did; but isn't it a little audacious to try
to pass yourself off as a school-girl of seventeen?"
Mrs. Slater laughed. "But I once was she, if I am not now," she said.
"You won't deny that."
"I certainly shall deny it, with your permission," replied Ludington. "I
remember her very well, and she was no more an old woman like you than
you are a young girl like her."
Mrs. Slater laughed again. "How sharp you are getting, my dear!" she
said. "Since you are so close after me, I shall have to admit that I have
changed slightly in appearance in the forty odd years since we went to
school at Hilton, and I'll admit that my heart is even less like a girl's
than my face; but, though I have changed so much, I am still the same
person, I suppose."
"Which do you mean?" inquired Miss Ludington. "You say in one breath that
you are a changed person, and that you are the same person. If you are a
changed person you can't be the same, and if you are the same you can't
have changed."
"I should really like to know what you are driving at," said Mrs. Slater,
calmly. "It seems to me that we are disputing about words."
"Oh, no, not about words! It is a great deal more than a question of
words," exclaimed Miss Ludington. "You say that we old women and the
girls who sat here forty years and more ago are the same persons,
notwithstanding we are so completely transformed without and within. I
say we are not the same, and thank God, for their sweet sakes, that we
are not. Surely that is not a mere dispute about words."
"But, if we are not those girls, then what has become of them?" asked
Mrs. Slater.
"You might better ask what had become of them if you had to seek them in
us; but I will tell you what has become of them, Sarah. It is what will
become of us when we, in our turn, vanish from earth, and the places that
know us now shall know us no more. They are immortal with God, and we
shall one day meet them over there."
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