Miss Mitchell lived not far from Ellen, in a tidy white house with a handsome smoke-tree on one side of the front walk and a willow with upside-down branches on the other.

Miss Mitchell had been born and brought up in this house, but she had been teaching school in a distant town ever since Ellen's day, so they had never been acquainted before she went to school.

Miss Mitchell lived alone with her mother, who was an old friend of Mrs.Zelotes.Ellen privately thought her rather better-looking than her own grandmother, though her admiration was based upon wholly sentimental reasons.

Old Mrs.
Mitchell might have earned more money in a museum of freaks than her daughter in a district school.

She was a mountain of rotundity, a conjunction of palpitating spheres, but the soul that dwelt in this painfully ponderous body was as mellow with affection and kindliness as a ripe pear, and the voice that proceeded from her ever-smiling lips was a hoarse and dove-like coo of love.