The Green Door | Page 4

awful, and impossible, but the little green door led into the past, and Letitia Hopkins was visiting her great-great-great- grandfather and grandmother, great-great-grandmother, and her great-great-aunts.
Letitia looked up in the faces, all staring wonderingly at her, and all of them had that familiar look, though she had no miniature of the others. Suddenly she knew that it was a likeness to her own face which she recognized, and it was as if she saw herself in a looking-glass. She felt as if her head was turning round and round, and presently her feet began to follow the motion of her head, then strong arms caught her, or she would have fallen.
When Letitia came to herself again, she was in a great feather bed, in the unfinished loft of the log-house. The wind blew in her face, a great star shone in her eyes. She thought at first she was out of doors. Then she heard a kind but commanding voice repeating: "Open your mouth," and stared up wildly into her great-great-great-grandmother's face, then around the strange little garret, lighted with a wisp of rag in a pewter dish of tallow, and the stars shining through the crack in the logs. Not a bit of furniture was there in the room, besides the bed and an oak chest. Some queer-looking garments hung about on pegs and swung in the draughts of the wind. It must have been snowing outside, for little piles of snow were scattered here and there about the room.
"Where--am--I?" Letitia asked feebly, but no sooner had she opened her mouth than her great-great-great-grandmother, Goodwife Hopkins, who had been watching her chance, popped in the pewter spoon full of some horribly black and bitter medicine.
Letitia nearly choked.
"Swallow it," said Goodwife Hopkins. "You swooned away, and it is good physic. It will soon make you well."
Goodwife Hopkins had a kind and motherly way, but a way from which there was no appeal. Letitia swallowed the bitter dose.
"Now go to sleep," ordered Goodwife Hopkins.
Letitia went to sleep. There might have been something quieting to the nerves in the good physic. She was awakened a little later by her great-great-grandmother and her two great-great-aunts coming to bed. They were to sleep with her. There were only two beds in Captain John Hopkins's house.
Letitia had never slept four in a bed before. There was not much room. She had to turn herself about crosswise, and then her toes stuck into the icy air, unless she kept them well pulled up. But soon she fell asleep again.
About midnight she was awakened by wild cries in the woods outside, and lay a minute, numb with fright, before she remembered where she was. Then she nudged her great-great-grandmother, Letitia, who lay next her.
"What's that?" she whispered fearfully.
"Oh, it's nothing but a catamount. Go to sleep again," said her great-great-grandmother sleepily. Her great-great-aunt, Phyllis, the youngest of them all, laughed on the other side.
"She's afraid of a catamount," said she.
Letitia could not go to sleep for a long while, for the wild cries continued, and she thought several times that the catamount was scratching up the walls of the house. When she did fall asleep it was not for long, for the fierce yells she had heard when she had first opened her little green door sounded again in her ears.
This time she did not need to wake her great-great-grandmother, who sat straight up in bed at the first sound.
"What's that?" whispered Letitia.
"Hush!" replied the other. "Injuns!"
Both the great-great-aunts were awake; they all listened, scarcely breathing. The yells came again, but fainter; then again, and fainter still. Letitia's great-great-grandmother settled back in bed again.
"Go to sleep now," said she. "They've gone away."
But Letitia was weeping with fright. "I can't go to sleep," she sobbed. "I'm afraid they'll come again."
"Very likely they will," replied the other Letitia coolly. "They come 'most every night."
The little great-great-aunt Phyllis laughed again. "She can't go to sleep because she heard Injuns," she tittered.
"Hush," said her sister Letitia, "she'll get accustomed to them in time."
But poor Letitia slept no more till four o'clock. Then she had just fallen into a sweet doze when she was pulled out of bed.
"Come, come," said her great-great-great-grandmother, Goodwife Hopkins, "we can have no lazy damsels here."
Letitia found that her bedfellows were up and dressed and downstairs. She heard a queer buzzing sound from below, as she stood in her bare feet on the icy floor and gazed about her, dizzy with sleep.
"Hasten and dress yourself," said Goodwife Hopkins. "Here are some of Letitia's garments I have laid out for you. Those which you wore here I have put away in the chest. They are too gay, and do not befit a sober, God-fearing damsel."
With that, Goodwife Hopkins descended to the room below, and Letitia dressed herself. It