The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-11-25
A MATCHLESS
 THANKSGIVING.

There was outspoken displeasure In Braeburn when it was known that some outsiders had bought the water-power at the Head of the River. at the other end of the place--a spot whose beauty had been sacred to strolling lovers and pfcnicking children. Now great brick buildings had gone up. and lines of model boarding houses: and all the ap- purtenance of mills and mill-people had completely ruined the place for pic turesqueness or pleasure.
 The dwellers in old Braeburn were all of immemoriaI desoant-that is. so far as the earliest settf@fs mad ethings immemorial The poorest among them was an aristocrat; and no one was moro of an aristocrat than Mrs. Temple, and few were any poorer.
 DO you know" Mary Featherstone said to her one day, it wouldn't be so bad if it brought any nice people into the place. But of course we know what mill people are. We read about them in all the English novels"
 Maybe so. Mary" said Mrs Temple. 'But I saw a strange man--T suppose he was one of them---he--he was very gos d-looking. Little Billy Burton had lost his penny and was crying bitterly. and he was comforting him and giving him a whole handful of pennies"
 "Yes; that's the way they do harm. Billy Burton will never be contented with one penny again. So vulgarw
 Mrs. Temple lived alone in one-half of a house, the rent of whose other half formed a good share of her in- come. She had given the tenant the front door, making the side entrance her own; and, locking her door into the hall, she had hung against 1t her one priceless possession, ful-length portrait by Copiey of her great grand father She felt it equal to a man in the house. It's possession announced her place in society; and no one could doubt her position or try in any way to impose upon her in it's proud pres- enee. sa
 It would, have been a singular person who could try to impose upon Mrs. Temple, a lady whose very gentleness should disarm tyrant. Yet there were things she had resented. She had been unreasonably angry when her Cousin John once, years ago, called her an old maid. It made her smile to see the dif- ferent way in which he treated her now since she had returned to Braeburn a married woman, bearing a mans name, although with hardly any money to support it.
 She had left home in order to teach, when quite youwg, and little later had gone as companion to lady who died while abroad Then word came from England, with wedding cards, that she had married a Mir. James Temple, and not long afterwards mourning cards came telling of Mir. Temples death. And when her father died suddenly she came home. wearing her mourning, and lived in the parsonage which he had left her, together with very trifie of money and his blessing.
 She never spoke to her old friends about her husband. 1t came to be un- derstood that his. name was too sacred, his loss too painful, for words. To the children born since her return she seemed of an antediluvian period. She was not quite Sbrty; but the young girls thought she ought to wear caps. < No one, in all these years, had dream ed of approaching Mrs. Temple as a lover. In fact, there had been no one to do so, except now and then young carson who had no sooner come to Brae- burn, with all his doctrines and their exegesis fresh at his fingers ends than ho was called somewhere else.
 So she had gone her serene way with it's small recurrent round. Her inter- ests were much bound up in her two eats and their families, in her flowers no one in Braeburn had such windows as she after frost came. She visited certain quite needy people; she could not give them money; but the fact that she was her fathers daughter made them feel her visits like those of a princess. She came into the sick-room. placid as a moonbeam, and her serenity calned fever, and her sweetness sooth- cd sorrow. Yet she wanted to scream at sight of Q spider. and ran like a deer from a COW.
 Of course Mrs. Temple felt that her friends valued her; and she valued them. But, after all, her life seemed narrow! and often there would come moments of vacuous depression in which she felt 1t hardly worth living. Then she would at once put on her hat and jacket and spend an hour with those she fancied worse off than her self; and doing whatever she found to do that she could make them happier, she would wonder at herself that she could have felt her own dear home with its flowers and its old portrait anything but Paradise.
 You would hardly have called Mrs. Temple pretty, but you would have felt, all the same. that she was lovely, with her dark hair banded away from a smooth brow, a skin fair and color less, and gray eyes changing from light to darIr ,tpder fhaiy hlaoLx Tasbes