The Forrest City times., 1893-12-08
HIS WIPES MISTAKE.
For Thirty-Five Years Her Pride
 Was Sufficient, and Then


 It was a little old village in Vest chester county, N Y, not far from the settlement which the Huguenots of the French Rochelle had founded.
 It was chill and still and o'ershad- owed by lush foliage and the growth of tall trees much untrimmed. Mrs. Skin ner dwelt in a large white house, pilastered in front, set back from the road and screened from the eye of casual passers by grove of elms.
 Once every day a coach, an anti quated coachman, pair of fat, sleek, mild horses drew up before the gate at the end of the narrow path. Jagged with white square stones leading to the door of the house.
 And from that door came tall feminine figure, erect, clad in robes of deep black.
 On Sundays likewise did Mrs. Skin ner appear with majesty of gait old age and solitude had been powerless to impair, walking up the aisle of the Episcopal church to the very front pew, whence, raising her eyes from the preachers face, she might see in the left transept the memorial tablets of three Skinners. now passed on to the silent majority.
 On the first Sunday in June the win dows were thrown open, the day mild with the June balminess of fresh-b blown leaf and flower, and the sunshine would creep in and lie in golden shaft over AL. .: Il oll lot ~f h.a three not put there by herself, the one sacred to the memory of Egbert Thomas Hamilton Skinner.
 That shaft of yellow sunlight lay so to-day, disturbed only as the checkered shadow of breeze-stirred bough shift ed and decomposed it's luminous bar, and Mrs Skinner, mayhap Ethel Mary de Kay, wife of the Egbert Thomas Hamilton Skinner of long years ago forgot the clergyman's text and neg lected to follow his discourse. Back into the past must her fancy have strayed, for when in its peroration the surpliced figure lifted up its hand and the congregation rustled to its feet or bent decorous heads upon its hands Mrs. Skinner, in her black robes, sat inn movable. and only stirred and seemed to wake to consciousness of external things when the organ pealed forth and the people slowly, with the re- lieved joyousness born of sense of the rapture of all nature without and the satisfaction of duty fulfilled, issued through the vaulted portal to the south wind. the restless singing of birds, the sun shining in a white glare on the gravel walk.
 The house with tine white columns was dusk and cool ard filled with a Sabbataria stiffness Somewhere the green blinds had been opened by some new, impetuous hand, untrained as yet to the strict usages that prevailed with the servants of this household
 Mrs. Skinner ordered the light shut out.
 Alone she sat in the darkened din- ing-room at her midday meal. An old servant softly moved in and out. Pic tures-family portraits of Skinners and De Kays-looked with the fiat surfaces and wooden poses that characterize such American art of the early years of the century from tarnished frames on the walls.
 Like more than one De Kay was this old womans naughty head, with the high, clear profile.
 Beautiful had she been, the Ethel de Kay of all those years ago. We'll had she known it, too. Yet what had her beauty availed? would she have asked, curving in bitter contempt those still fine, full lips.
 After she had passed into the draw ing-room the old servant who had dressed her mistress hair and hung up her black dresses these forty years noiselessly entered.
 Shall pack, ma'am?"
 Mrs. Skinner was moment in reply ing.
 "A few things in valise-yes. We shall only be gone two or three days"
 The next day mistress and maid were ascending the steps of the old town house in Tenth street. It had been carefully since the departure of