recalled hearing told many times on the crackerboxes at the general store, or on the corner before the drug-store, or around the stove at the post-office, with additions from month to month as death, marriage, child-birth, or some more unusual adventure befell the subjects.
So later Ambrose, sitting before his typewriter, let his memory flow through the keys. Were it a spring morning and did he happen to gaze out of his window to the street below to see a vendor with a pushcart laden with lilac blossoms, the vision was likely to associate itself in his mind with a long dusty road, a house enclosed in clusters of lilac and snowball and syringa bushes, and with the eccentric old woman living in the house, who, with her wagon and her mule, collected in barrels the village swill wherewith to feed her hungry hogs. He remembered how she went on with this drudgery long after she had scraped together enough money to send her son and daughter to college, even after they had married and gone out into the great world to live, and how, at last, when she died, it was discovered that she was rich enough to provide for the future of her grandchildren. That was all, but Ambrose would envelop this homely history in a wealth of vivid details and the woman with her hogs would arise be
