done better. I started up the Illinois shore in the canoe just after dark. I started across to the town from a little below the ferry-landing, and the drift of the current fetched me in at the bottom of the town.  I tied up and started along the bank.  There was a light burning in a little shanty that hadn't been lived in for a long time, and I wondered who had took up quarters there.  I slipped up and peeped in at the window.  There was a woman about forty year old in there knitting by a candle that was on a pine table.  I didn't know her face; she was a stranger, for you couldn't start a face in that town that I didn't know.  Now this was lucky, because I was weakening; I was getting afraid I had come; people might know my voice and find me out.  But if this woman had been in such a little town two days she could tell me all I wanted to know; so I knocked at the door, and made up my mind I wouldn't forget I was a girl. CHAPTER XI. “COME in,” says the woman, and I did.  She says: “Take a cheer.” I done it.  She looked me all over with her little shiny eyes, and says: “What might your name be?” “Sarah Williams.” “Where 'bouts do you live?  In this neighborhood?' “No'm.  In Hookerville, seven mile below.  I've walked all the way and I'm all tired out.” “Hungry, too, I reckon.  I'll find you something.” “No'm, I ain't hungry.  I was so hungry I had to stop two miles below here at a farm; so I ain't hungry no more.  It's what makes me so late. My mother's down sick, and out of money and everything, and I come to tell my uncle Abner Moore.  He lives at the upper end of the town, she says.  I hain't ever been here before.  Do you know him?” “No; but I don't know everybody yet.  I haven't lived here quite two weeks. It's a considerable ways to the upper end of the town.  You better stay here all night.  Take off your bonnet.” “No,” I says; “I'll rest a while, I reckon, and go on.  I ain't afeared of the dark.” She said she wouldn't let me go by myself,