HILLSBOROPEOPLE

BYDOROTHY CANFIELD

AUTHOR OFTHE BENT TWIG, THE SQUIRREL CAGE, ETC. 

WITH OCCASIONAL VERMONT VERSESBYSARAH N. CLEGHORN

1915

CONTENTS

VERMONT (Poem)HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN (Poem)AT THE FOOT OF HEMLOCK MOUNTAINPETUNIAS--THAT'S FOR REMEMBRANCETHE HEYDAY OF THE BLOODAS A BIRD OUT OF THE SNARETHE BEDQUILTPORTRAIT OF A PHILOSOPHERFLINT AND FIREA SAINT'S HOURS (Poem)IN MEMORY OF L. H. W. IN NEW NEW ENGLANDTHE DELIVERERNOCTES AMBROSIANAE (Poem)HILLSBORO'S GOOD LUCKSALEM HILLS TO ELLIS ISLAND (Poem)AVUNCULUSBY ABANA AND PHARPAR (Poem)FINISA VILLAGE MUNCHAUSENTHE ARTISTWHO ELSE HEARD IT? (Poem)A DROP IN THE BUCKETTHE GOLDEN TONGUE OF IRELAND (Poem)PIPER TIMADESTE FIDELES!VERMONT

 Wide and shallow in the cowslip marshes Floods the freshet of the April snow. Late drifts linger in the hemlock gorges, Through the brakes and mosses trickling slow Where the Mayflower, Where the painted trillium, leaf and blow. 

 Foliaged deep, the cool midsummer maples Shade the porches of the long white street; Trailing wide, Olympian elms lean over Tiny churches where the highroads meet. Fields of fireflies Wheel all night like stars among the wheat. 

 Blaze the mountains in the windless autumn Frost-clear, blue-nooned, apple-ripening days; Faintly fragrant in the farther valleys Smoke of many bonfires swells the haze; Fair-bound cattle Plod with lowing up the meadowy ways. 

 Roaring snows down-sweeping from the uplands Bury the still valleys, drift them deep. Low along the mountain, lake-blue shadows, Sea-blue shadows in the hollows sleep. High above them Blinding crystal is the sunlit steep. 

HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN

 By orange grove and palm-tree, we walked the southern shore, Each day more still and golden than was the day before. That calm and languid sunshine! How faint it made us grow To look on Hemlock Mountain when the storm hangs low!

 To see its rocky pastures, its sparse but hardy corn, The mist roll off its forehead before a harvest morn; To hear the pine-trees crashing across its gulfs of snow Upon a roaring midnight when the whirlwinds blow. 

 Tell not of lost Atlantis, or fabled Avalon; The olive, or the vineyard, no winter breathes upon; Away from Hemlock Mountain we could not well forego, For all the summer islands where the gulf tides flow. 

AT THE FOOT OF HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN

"In connection with this phase of the problem of transportation it must beremembered that the rush of population to the great cities was no temporarymovement. It is caused by a final revolt against that malignant relic ofthe dark ages, the country village and by a healthy craving for the deep, full life of the metropolis, for contact with the vitalizing stream ofhumanity. "--Pritchell's "Handbook of Economics, " page 247. 

Sometimes people from Hillsboro leave our forgotten valley, high among theGreen Mountains, and "go down to the city, " as the phrase runs, They alwayscome back exclaiming that they should think New Yorkers would just die oflonesomeness, and crying out in an ecstasy of relief that it does seem sogood to get back where there are some folks. After the desolate isolationof city streets, empty of humanity, filled only with hurrying ghosts, thevestibule of our church after morning service fills one with an exaltedrealization of the great numbers of the human race. It is like coming intoa warmed and lighted room, full of friendly faces, after wandering longby night in a forest peopled only with flitting shadows. In thephantasmagoric pantomime of the city, we forget that there are so many realpeople in all the world, so diverse, so unfathomably human as those whomeet us in the little post-office on the night of our return to Hillsboro. 

Like any other of those gifts of life which gratify insatiable cravings ofhumanity, living in a country village conveys a satisfaction which isincommunicable. A great many authors have written about it, just as a greatmany authors have written about the satisfaction of being in love, but inthe one, as in the other case, the essence of the thing escapes. Peoplerejoice in sweethearts because all humanity craves love, and they thrive incountry villages because they crave human life. Now the living spirit ofneither of these things can be caught in a net of words. All the foolish, fond doings of lovers may be set down on paper by whatever eavesdroppercares to take the trouble, but no one can realize from that recordanything of the glory in the hearts of the unconscious two. All the queergrammar and insignificant surface eccentricities of village character maybe ruthlessly reproduced in every variety of dialect, but no one can guessfrom that record the abounding flood of richly human life which pours alongthe village street. 

This tormenting inequality between the thing felt and the impressionconveyed had vexed us unceasingly until one day Simple Martin, the townfool, who always says our wise things, said one of his wisest. He waslounging by the watering-trough one sunny day in June, when a carriage-loadof "summer folk" from Windfield over the mountain stopped to water theirhorses. They asked him, as they always, always ask all of us, "For mercy'ssake, what do you people _do_ all the time, away off here, so far fromeverything. "

Simple Martin was not irritated, or perplexed, or rendered helplesslyinarticulate by this question, as the rest of us had always been. Helooked around him at the lovely, sloping lines of Hemlock Mountain, at theNecronett River singing in the sunlight, at the familiar, friendly facesof the people in the street, and he answered in astonishment at theignorance of his questioners, "_Do_? Why, we jes' _live_!"

We felt that he had explained us once and for all. We had known that, ofcourse, but we hadn't before, in our own phrase, "sensed it. " We justlive. And sometimes it seems to us that we are the only people in Americaengaged in that most wonderful occupation. We know, of course, that wemust be wrong in thinking this, and that there must be countless otherHillsboros scattered everywhere, rejoicing as we do in an existence whichdoes not necessarily make us care-free or happy, which does not in theleast absolve us from the necessity of working hard (for Hillsboro isunbelievably poor in money), but which does keep us alive in every fiberof our sympathy and thrilling with the consciousness of the life of others. 

A common and picturesque expression for a common experience runs, "It's sonoisy I can't hear myself think. " After a visit to New York we feel thatits inhabitants are so deafened by the constant blare of confusion thatthey can't feel themselves live. The steady sufferers from this complaintdo not realize their condition. They find it on the whole less trouble_not_ to feel themselves live, and they are most uneasy when chance forcesthem to spend a few days (on shipboard, for instance) where they are notprotected by ceaseless and aimless activity from the consciousness thatthey are themselves. They cannot even conceive the bitter-sweet, vitaltaste of that consciousness as we villagers have it, and they cannotunderstand how arid their existence seems to us without this unhurried, penetrating realization of their own existence and of the meaning of theiracts. We do not blame city dwellers for not having it; we ourselves loseit when we venture into their maelstrom. Like them, we become dwarfed byoverwhelming numbers, and shriveled by the incapacity to "sense" thehumanity of the countless human simulacra about us. But we do not staywhere we cannot feel ourselves live. We hurry back to the shadow ofHemlock Mountain, feeling that to love life one does not need to be whatIs usually called happy, one needs only to live. 

It cannot be, of course, that we are the only community to discover thispatent fact; but we know no more of the others than they of us. All thatwe hear from that part of America which is not Hillsboro is the wild yellof excitement going up from the great cities, where people seem to bedoing everything that was ever done or thought of except just living. Citydwellers make money, make reputations (good and bad), make museums andsubways, make charitable institutions, make with a hysteric rapidity, likeexcited spiders, more and yet more complications in the mazy labyrinths oftheir lives, but they never make each others' acquaintances . . . And thatis all that is worth doing in the world. 

We who live in Hillsboro know that they are to be pitied, not blamed, forthis fatal omission. We realize that only in Hillsboro and places like itcan one have "deep, full life and contact with the vitalizing stream ofhumanity. " We know that in the very nature of humanity the city is a smalland narrow world, the village a great and wide one, and that the utmostefforts of city dwellers will not avail to break the bars of the prisonwhere they are shut in, each with his own kind. They may look out from thewindows upon a great and varied throng, as the beggar munching a crust maylook in at a banqueting hall, but the people they are forced to live withare exactly like themselves; and that way lies not only monomania but anennui that makes the blessing of life savorless. 

If this does not seem the plainest possible statement of fact take aconcrete instance. Can a banker in the city by any possibility come toknow what kind of an individual is the remote impersonal creature whowaits on him in a department store? Most bankers recognize with amisguided joy this natural wall between themselves and people who are notbankers, and add to it as many stones of their own quarrying as possible;but they are not shut off from all the quickening diversity of life anymore effectually than the college-settlement, boys' Sunday-school, brandof banker. The latter may try as hard as he pleases, he simply cannotachieve real acquaintanceship with a "storekeeper, " as we call them, anymore than the clerk can achieve real acquaintanceship with him. 

Lack of any elements of common life form as impassable a barrier as lackof a common language, whereas with us in Hillsboro all the life we have iscommon. Everyone is needed to live it. 

There can be no city dweller of experience who does not know the result ofthis herding together of the same kind of people, this intellectual andmoral inbreeding. To the accountant who knows only accounts, the worldcomes to seem like one great ledger, and account-keeping the only vitalpursuit in life. To the banker who knows only bankers, the world seems onegreat bank filled with money, accompanied by people. The prison doors ofuniformity are closed inexorably upon them. 

And then what happens? Why, when anything goes wrong with their trumperyaccount books, or their trashy money, these poor folk are like blind menwho have lost their staves. With all the world before them they dare notcontinue to go forward. We in Hillsboro are sorry for the account-keeperswho disappear forever, fleeing from all who know them because theiraccounts have come out crooked, we pity the banker who blows out hisbrains when something has upset his bank; but we can't help feeling withthis compassion an admixture of the exasperated impatience we have forthose Prussian school boys who jump out of third-story windows becausethey did not reach a certain grade in their Latin examinations. Life isnot accounts, or banks, or even Latin examinations, and it is a sign ofinexperience to think it so. The trouble with the despairing banker isthat he has never had a chance to become aware of the comforting vastnessof the force which animates him in common with all the rest of humanity, to which force a bank failure is no apocalyptic end of Creation, but amere incident or trial of strength like a fall in a slippery road. Absorbed in his solitary progress, the banker has forgotten that hisbusiness in life is not so much to keep from falling as to get up againand go forward. 

If the man to whom the world was a bank had not been so inexorably shutaway from the bracing, tonic shock of knowing men utterly diverse, to whomthe world was just as certainly only a grocery store, or a cobbler's bench, he might have come to believe in a world that is none of these things andis big enough to take them all in; and he might have been alive thisminute, a credit to himself, useful to the world, and doubtless very muchmore agreeable to his family than in the days of his blind arrogance. 

The pathetic feature of this universal inexperience among city dwellers ofreal life and real people is that it is really entirely enforced andinvoluntary. At heart they crave knowledge of real life and sympathy withtheir fellow-men as starving men do food. In Hillsboro we explain toourselves the enormous amount of novel-reading and play-going in the greatcities as due to a perverted form of this natural hunger for human life. If people are so situated they can't get it fresh, they will take itcanned, which is undoubtedly good for those in the canning business; butwe feel that we who have better food ought not to be expected to treattheir boughten canned goods very seriously. We can't help smiling at thelife-and-death discussions of literary people about their preferences instyle and plot and treatment . . . Their favorite brand on the can, so tospeak. 

To tell the truth, all novels seem to us badly written, they are so faintand faded in comparison to the brilliant colors of the life whichpalpitates up and down our village street, called by strangers, "so quaintand sleepy-looking. " What does the author of a novel do for you, afterall, even the best author? He presents to you people not nearly sointeresting as your next-door neighbors, makes them do things not nearlyso exciting as what happened to your grandfather, and doles out to you inmeager paragraphs snatches of that comprehending and consolatoryphilosophy of life, which long ago you should have learned to manufacturefor yourself out of every incident in your daily routine. Of course, ifyou don't know your next-door neighbors, and have never had time to listento what happened to your grandfather and are too busy catching trains tophilosophize on those subjects if you did know them, no more remains to besaid. By all means patronize the next shop you see which displays in itsshow windows canned romances, adventures, tragedies, farces, and the likeline of goods. Live vicariously, if you can't at first hand; but don't beannoyed at our pity for your method of passing blindfold through life. 

And don't expect to find such a shop in our village. To open one therewould be like trying to crowd out the great trees on Hemlock Mountain byplanting a Noah's Ark garden among them. Romances, adventures, tragedies, and farces . . . Why, we are the characters of those plots. Every child whoruns past the house starts a new story, every old man whom we leavesleeping in the burying-ground by the Necronsett River is the ending ofanother . . . Or perhaps the beginning of a sequel. Do you say that in thecity a hundred more children run past the windows of your apartment thanalong our solitary street, and that funeral processions cross your everywalk abroad? True, but they are stories written in a tongueincomprehensible to you. You look at the covers you may even flutter theleaves and look at the pictures but you cannot tell what they are allabout. You are like people bored and yawning at a performance of a tragedyby Sophocles, because the actors speak in Greek. So dreadful and moving athing as a man's sudden death may happen before your eyes, but you do notknow enough of what it means to be moved by it. For you it is not really aman who dies. It is the abstract idea of a man, leaving behind himabstract possibilities of a wife and children. You knew nothing of him, you know nothing of them, you shudder, look the other way, and hurryalong, your heart a little more blunted to the sorrows of others, a littlemore remote from your fellows even than before. 

All Hillsboro is more stirred than that, both to sympathy and active help, by the news that Mrs. Brownell has broken her leg. It means somethingunescapably definite to us, about which we not only can, but must takeaction. It means that her sickly oldest daughter will not get the care sheneeds if somebody doesn't go to help out; it means that if we do not dosomething that bright boy of hers will have to leave school, just when heis in the way of winning a scholarship in college; it means, in short, acrisis in several human lives, which by the mere fact of being known callsforth sympathy as irresistibly as sunshine in May opens the leaf buds. 

Just as it is only one lover in a million who can continue to love hismistress during a lifetime of absolute separation from her, so it is oneman in a million who can continue his sympathy and interest in hisfellow-men without continual close contact with them. The divine feelingof responsibility for the well-being of others is diluted and washed awayin great cities by the overwhelming impersonal flood of vast numbers; invillages it is strengthened by the sight, apparent to the dullest eyes, of immediate personal and visible application. In other words, we are notonly the characters of our unwritten stories, but also part authors. Something of the final outcome depends upon us, something of the creativeinstinct of the artist is stirred to life within every one ofus . . . However unconscious of it in our countrified simplicity we may be. The sympathy we feel for a distressed neighbor has none of the impotentsterility of a reader's sympathy for a distressed character in a book. There is always a chance to try to help, and if that fail, to try againand yet again. Death writes the only _Finis_ to our stories, and since achance to start over again has been so unfailingly granted us here, wecannot but feel that Death may mean only turning over another page. 

I suppose we do not appreciate the seriousness of fiction-writing, nor itsimportance to those who cannot get any nearer to real life. And yet it isnot that we are unprogressive. Our young people, returning from college, or from visits to the city, freshen and bring up to date our ideas onliterature as rigorously as they do our sleeves and hats; but after ashort stay in Hillsboro even these conscientious young missionaries ofculture turn away from the feeble plots of Ibsen and the tame inventionsof Bernard Shaw to the really exciting, perplexing, and stimulating eventsin the life of the village grocer. 

In "Ghosts, " Ibsen preaches a terrible sermon on the responsibility of onegeneration for the next, but not all his relentless logic can move you tothe sharp throb of horrified sympathy you feel as you see NelsePettingrew's poor mother run down the street, her shawl flung hastily overher head, framing a face of despairing resolve, such as can never look atyou out of the pages of a book. Somebody has told her that Nelse has beendrinking again and "is beginning to get ugly. " For Hillsboro is no modelvillage, but the world entire, with hateful forces of evil lying in waitfor weakness. Who will not lay down "Ghosts" to watch, with a painfullybeating heart, the progress of this living "Mrs. Alving" past the house, pleading, persuading, coaxing the burly weakling, who will be saved from aweek's debauch if she can only get him safely home now, and keep him quiettill "the fit goes by. "

At the sight everybody in Hillsboro realizes that Nelse "got it from hisfather, " with a penetrating sense of the tragedy of heredity, quite asstimulating to self-control in the future as Ibsen is able to make us feelin "Ghosts. " But we know something better than Ibsen, for Mrs. Pettingrewis no "Mrs. Alving. " She is a plain, hard-featured woman who takes insewing for a living, and she is quite unlettered, but she is a general inthe army of spiritual forces. She does not despair, she does not give uplike the half-hearted mother in "Ghosts, " she does not waste her strengthin concealments; she stands up to her enemy and fights. She fought thewild beast in Nelse's father, hand to hand, all his life, and he died abetter man than when she married him. Undaunted, she fought it in Nelse asa boy, and now as a man; and in the flowering of his physical forces whenthe wind of his youth blows most wildly through the hateful thicket ofinherited weaknesses she generally wins the battle. 

And this she has done with none of the hard, consistent strength andintelligence of your make-believe heroine in a book, so disheartening anexample to our faltering impulses for good. She has been infinitely humanand pathetically fallible; she has cried out and hesitated and complainedand done the wrong thing and wept and failed and still fought on, till tothink of her is, for the weakest of us, like a bugle call to highendeavor. Nelse is now a better man than his father, and we shut up"Ghosts" with impatience that Ibsen should have selected that story totell out of all the tales there must have been in the village where _he_lived. 

Now imagine if you can . . . For I cannot even faintly indicate toyou . . . Our excitement when Nelse begins to look about him for a wife. Inthe first place, we are saved by our enforced closeness to real peoplefrom wasting our energies in the profitless outcry of economists thatpeople like Nelse should be prohibited from having children. It occurs tous that perhaps the handsome fellow's immense good-humor and generosityare as good inheritance as the selfishness and cold avarice of priggishyoung Horace Gallatin, who never drinks a drop. Perhaps at some futuredate all people who are not perfectly worthy to have children will be keptfrom it by law. In Hillsboro, we think, that after such a decree the humanrace would last just one generation; but that is not the point now. Thequestion is, will Nelse find a wife who will carry on his mother's work, or will he not?

If you think you are excited over a serial story because you can't guessif "Lady Eleanor" really stole the diamonds or not, it is only because youhave no idea of what excitement is. You are in a condition of stagnantlethargy compared to that of Hillsboro over the question whether Nelsewill marry Ellen Brownell, "our Ellen, " or Flossie Merton, the ex-factorygirl, who came up from Albany to wait at the tavern, and who is said tohave a taste for drink herself. 

Old Mrs. Perkins, whom everybody had thought sunk in embittered discontentabout the poverty and isolation of her last days, roused herself not longago and gave Ellen her cherished tortoise-shell back-comb, and her prettywhite silk shawl to wear to village parties; and racked with rheumatism, as the old woman is, she says she sits up at night to watch the youngpeople go back from choir rehearsal so that she can see which girl Nelseis "beauing home. " Could the most artfully contrived piece of fiction moreblessedly sweep the self-centered complainings of old age into generousand vitalizing interest in the lives of others?

As for the "pity and terror, " the purifying effects of which are sovaunted in Greek tragedies, could Aeschylus himself have plunged us into amore awful desolation of pity than the day we saw old Squire Marvin beingtaken along the street on his way to the insane asylum? All the self-mademiseries of his long life were in our minds, the wife he had loved andkilled with the harsh violence of a nature he had never learned tocontrol, the children he had adored unreasonably and spoiled and turnedagainst, and they on him with a violence like his own, the people he hadtried to benefit with so much egotistic pride mixed in his kindness thathis favors made him hated, his vanity, his generosity, his despairingoutcries against the hostility he had so well earned . . . At the sight ofthe end of all this there was no heart in Hillsboro that was not wrungwith a pity and terror more penetrating and purifying even thanShakespeare has made the centuries feel for Lear. 

Ah, at the foot of Hemlock Mountain we do not need books to help us feelthe meaning of life!

Nor do we need them to help us feel the meaning of death. You, in thecities, living with a feverish haste in the present only, and clutching atit as a starving man does at his last crust, you cannot understand thecomforting sense we have of belonging almost as much to the past andfuture as to the present. Our own youth is not dead to us as yours is, from the lack of anything to recall it to you, and people we love do notslip quickly into that bitter oblivion to which the dead are consigned bythose too hurried to remember. They are not remembered perfunctorily fortheir "good qualities" which are carved on their tombstones, but all thequaint and dear absurdities which make up personality are embalmed in theleisurely, peaceable talk of the village, still enriched by all that theybrought to it. We are not afraid of the event which men call death, because we know that, in so far as we have deserved it, the same homelyimmortality awaits us. 

Every spring, at the sight of the first cowslip, our old people laugh andsay to each other, "Will you _ever_ forget how Aunt Dorcas used to take uschildren out cowslipping, and how she never thought it 'proper' to lifther skirt to cross the log by the mill, and always fell in the brook?" Thelog has moldered away a generation ago, the mill is only a heap ofblackened timbers, but as they speak, they are not only children again, but Aunt Dorcas lives again for them and for us who never sawher . . . Dear, silly, kind old Aunt Dorcas, past-mistress in the lovely artof spoiling children. Just so the children we have spoiled, the people wehave lived with, will continue to keep us living with them. We shall havetime to grow quite used to whatever awaits us after the tangled rosebushesof Hillsboro burying-ground bloom over our heads, before we shall havegradually faded painlessly away from the life of men and women. Wesometimes feel that, almost alone in the harassed and weary modern world, we love that life, and yet we are the least afraid to leave it. 

It is usually dark when the shabby little narrow-gauge train brings ushome to Hillsboro from wanderings in the great world, and the big pond bythe station is full of stars. Up on the hill the lights of the villagetwinkle against the blurred mass of Hemlock Mountain, and above them thestars again. It is very quiet, the station is black and deserted, the roadwinding up to the village glimmers uncertainly in the starlight, and darkforms hover vaguely about. Strangers say that it is a very depressingstation at which to arrive, but we know better. There is no feeling in theworld like that with which one starts up the white road, stars below himin the quiet pool, stars above him in the quiet sky, friendly lightsshowing the end of his journey is at hand, and the soft twilight full ofvoices all familiar, all welcoming. 

Poor old Uncle Abner Rhodes, returning from an attempt to do business inthe city, where he had lost his money, his health, and his hopes, said hedidn't see how going up to Heaven could be so very different from walkingup the hill from the station with Hemlock Mountain in front of you. Hesaid it didn't seem to him as though even in heaven you could feel morethan then that you had got back where there are some folks, that you hadgot back home. 

Sometimes when the stars hang very bright over Hemlock Mountain and theNecronsett River sings loud in the dusk, we remember the old man's speech, and, though we smile at his simplicity, we think, too, that the best whichawaits us can only be very much better but not so very different from whatwe have known here. 

PETUNIAS--THAT'S FOR REMEMBRANCE

It was a place to which, as a dreamy, fanciful child escaping fromnursemaid and governess, Virginia had liked to climb on hot summerafternoons. She had spent many hours, lying on the grass in the shade ofthe dismantled house, looking through the gaunt, uncovered rafters of thebarn at the white clouds, like stepping-stones in the broad blue river ofsky flowing between the mountain walls. 

Older people of the summer colony called it forlorn and desolate--thedeserted farm, lying high on the slope of Hemlock Mountain--but to thechild there was a charm about the unbroken silence which brooded over thelittle clearing. The sun shone down warmly on the house's battered shelland through the stark skeleton of the barn. The white birches, strangesylvan denizens of door and barnyard, stood shaking their delicate leavesas if announcing sweetly that the kind forest would cover all the woundsof human neglect, and soon everything would be as though man had notlived. And everywhere grew the thick, strong, glistening grass, coveringeven the threshold with a cushion on which the child's foot fell asnoiselessly as a shadow. It used to seem to her that nothing could everhave happened in this breathless spot. 

Now she was a grown woman, she told herself, twenty-three years old andhad had, she often thought, as full a life as any one of her age couldhave. Her college course had been varied with vacations in Europe; she hadhad one season in society; she was just back from a trip around the world. Her busy, absorbing life had given her no time to revisit the narrow greenValley where she had spent so many of her childhood's holidays But now awhim for self-analysis, a desire to learn if the old glamour about thelovely enchanted region still existed for her weary, sophisticatedmaturity, had made her break exacting social engagements and sent her backalone, from the city, to see how the old valley looked in the spring. 

Her disappointment was acute. The first impression and the one whichremained with her, coloring painfully all the vistas of dim woodlandaisles and sunlit brooks, was of the meagerness and meanness of thedesolate lives lived in this paradise. This was a fact she had not noticedas a child, accepting the country people as she did all otherincomprehensible elders. They had not seemed to her to differ noticeablyfrom her delicate, esthetic mother, lying in lavender silk negligées onwicker couches, reading the latest book of Mallarmé, or from hercompetent, rustling aunt, guiding the course of the summer colony's sociallife with firm hands. There was as yet no summer colony, this week in May. Even the big hotel was not open. Virginia was lodged in the house of oneof the farmers. There was no element to distract her mind from the narrow, unlovely lives of the owners of that valley of beauty. 

They were grinding away at their stupefying monotonous tasks as though themiracle of spring were not taking place before their eyes. They wereabsorbed in their barnyards and kitchen sinks and bad cooking and worsedressmaking. The very children, grimy little utilitarians like theirparents, only went abroad in the flood of golden sunshine, in order torifle the hill pastures of their wild strawberries. Virginia was no longera child to ignore all this. It was an embittering, imprisoning thoughtfrom which she could not escape even in the most radiant vision of Maywoods. She was a woman now, with a trained mind which took in thesaddening significance of these lives, not so much melancholy or tragic asutterly neutral, featureless, dun-colored. They weighed on her heart asshe walked and drove about the lovely country they spoiled for her. 

What a heavenly country it was! She compared it to similar valleys inSwitzerland, in Norway, in Japan, and her own shone out pre-eminent with athousand beauties of bold skyline, of harmoniously "composed" distances, of exquisitely fairy-like detail of foreground. But oh! the woodenpacking-boxes of houses and the dreary lives they sheltered!

The Pritchard family, her temporary hosts, summed up for her the humanlife of the valley. There were two children, inarticulate, vacant-facedcountry children of eight and ten, out from morning till night in thesunny, upland pastures, but who could think of nothing but how many quartsof berries they had picked and what price could be exacted for them. Therewas Gran'ther Pritchard, a doddering, toothless man of seventy-odd, andhis wife, a tall, lean, lame old woman with a crutch who sat all throughthe mealtimes speechlessly staring at the stranger, with faded gray eyes. There was Mr. Pritchard and his son Joel, gaunt Yankees, toiling withfierce concentration to "get the crops in" after a late spring. Finallythere was Mrs. Pritchard, worn and pale, passing those rose-colored springdays grubbing in her vegetable garden. And all of them silent, silent asthe cattle they resembled. There had been during the first few days of herweek's stay some vague attempts at conversation, but Virginia was soonaware that they had not the slightest rudiments of a common speech. 

A blight was on even those faint manifestations of the esthetic spiritwhich they had not killed out of their bare natures. The pictures in thehouse were bad beyond belief, and the only flowers were some petunias, growing in a pot, carefully tended by Grandma Pritchard. They bore a massof blossoms of a terrible magenta, like a blow in the face to anyonesensitive to color. It usually stood on the dining-table, which wascovered with a red cloth. "Crimson! Magenta! It is no wonder they are lostsouls!" cried the girl to herself. 

On the last day of her week, even as she was trying to force down somefood at the table thus decorated, she bethought herself of her old hauntof desolate peace on the mountainside. She pushed away from the table withan eager, murmured excuse, and fairly ran out into the gold and green ofthe forest, a paradise lying hard by the pitiable little purgatory of thefarmhouse. As she fled along through the clean-growing maple-groves, through stretches of sunlit pastures, azure with bluets, through darkpines, red-carpeted by last year's needles, through the flickering, shadowy-patterned birches, she cried out to all this beauty to set herright with the world of her fellows, to ease her heart of its burden ofdisdainful pity. 

But there was no answer. 

She reached the deserted clearing breathless, and paused to savor itsslow, penetrating peace. The white birches now almost shut the house fromview; the barn had wholly disappeared. From the finely proportioned olddoorway of the house protruded a long, grayed, weather-beaten tuft of hay. The last utilitarian dishonor had befallen it. It had not even its olddignity of vacant desolation. She went closer and peered inside. Yes, hay, the scant cutting from the adjacent old meadows, had been piled high inthe room which had been the gathering-place of the forgotten family life. She stepped in and sank down on it, struck by the far-reaching view fromthe window. As she lay looking out, the silence was as insistent as aheavy odor in the air. 

The big white clouds lay like stepping-stones in the sky's blue river, just as when she was a child. Their silver-gleaming brightness blindedher . . . "_Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh . . . Warte nur . . . Balde . . . Ruhest. . . Du . . . " she began to murmur, and stopped, awed by the immensity ofthe hush about her. She closed her eyes, pillowed her head on herupthrown arms, and sank into a wide, bright reverie, which grewdimmer and vaguer as the slow changeless hours filed by. 

She did not know if it were from a doze, or but from this dreamy haze thatshe was wakened by the sound of voices outside the house, under the windowby which she lay. There were the tones of a stranger and those of old Mrs. Pritchard, but now flowing on briskly with a volubility unrecognizable. Virginia sat up, hesitating Were they only passing by, or stopping? ShouldShe show herself or let them go on? In an instant the question was settledfor her. It was too late. She would only shame them if they knew herthere. She had caught her own name. They were talking of her. 

"Well, you needn't, " said the voice of Mrs. Pritchard "You can just saveyour breath to cool your porridge You can't get nothin' out'n her. "

"But she's traveled 'round so much, seems's though . . . " began the otherwoman's voice. 

"_Don't_ it?" struck in old Mrs. Pritchard assentingly, "But 'tain't so!"

The other was at a loss. "Do you mean she's stuck-up and won't answeryou?" Mrs. Pritchard burst into a laugh, the great, resonant good-natureof which amazed Virginia. She had not dreamed that one of these sour, silent people could laugh like that. "No, _land_ no, Abby! She's assoft-spoken as anybody could be, poor thing! She ain't got nothin' to say. That's all. Why, I can git more out'n any pack-peddler that's only beenfrom here to Rutland and back than out'n her . . . And she's traveled allsummer long for five years, she was tellin' us, and last year went aroundthe world. "

"Good land! Think of it!" cried the other, awestruck. "China! An' Afriky!An' London!"

"That's the way we felt! That's the reason we let her come. There ain't noprofit in one boarder, and we never take boarders, anyhow. But I thought'twould be a chance for the young ones to learn something about howforeign folks lived. " She broke again into her epic laugh. "Why, Abby, 'twould ha' made you die to see us the first few days she was there, tryin' to get somethin' out'n her. Italy, now . . . Had she been there? 'Oh, yes, she _adored_ Italy!'" Virginia flushed at the echo of her ownexaggerated accent. "Well, we'd like to know somethin' about Italy. Whatdid they raise there? Honest, Abby, you'd ha' thought we'd hit her sideth' head. She thought and she _thought_, and all she could say was'olives, ' Nothing else? 'Well, she'd never noticed anything else . . . Oh, yes, lemons. ' Well, that seemed kind o' queer vittles, but you can't nevertell how foreigners git along, so we thought maybe they just lived off'nolives and lemons; and Joel he asked her how they raised 'em, and if theymanured heavy or trusted to phosphate, and how long the trees took beforethey began to bear, and if they pruned much, and if they had the sametrouble we do, come harvest time, to hire hands enough to git in th'crop. "

She paused. The other woman asked, "Well, what did she say?"

The echoes rang again to the old woman's great laugh. "We might as wellha' asked her 'bout the back side of th' moon! So we gave up on olives andlemons! Then Eben he asked her 'bout taxes there. Were they on land mostlyand were they high and who 'sessed 'em and how 'bout school tax. Did thestate pay part o' that? You see town meetin' being so all tore up everyyear 'bout taxes, Eben he thought 'twould be a chance to hear how otherfolks did, and maybe learn somethin'. Good land, Abby, I've set there and'most died, trying to keep from yellin' right out with laugh to see ourfolks tryin' to learn somethin' 'bout foreign parts from that woman that'straveled in 'em steady for five years. I bet she was blind-folded andgagged and had cotton in her ears the hull time she was there!"

"Didn't she tell you anythin' 'bout taxes?"

"Taxes? You'd ha' thought 'twas bumble-bees' hind legs we was askin''bout! She ackshilly seemed s'prised to be asked. Land! What had she everthought 'bout such triflin' things as taxes. She didn't know how they wastaxed in Italy, or _if_ they was . . . Nor anywhere else. That what it comedown to, every time. She didn't know! She didn't know what kind of schoolsthey had, nor what the roads was made of, nor who made 'em. She couldn'ttell you what hired men got, nor _any_ wages, nor what girls that didn'tget married did for a living, nor what rent they paid, nor how they 'musedthemselves, nor how much land was worth, nor if they had factories, nor ifthere was any lumberin' done, nor how they managed to keep milk in suchawful hot weather without ice. Honest, Abby, she couldn't even say if thehouses had cellars or not. Why, it come out she never was _in_ a realhouse that anybody lived in . . . Only hotels. She hadn't got to know asingle real person that b'longed there. Of course she never found outanything 'bout how they lived. Her mother was there, she said, and heraunt, and that Bilson family that comes to th' village summers, an' theGoodriches an' the Phippses an' the . . . Oh, sakes alive, you know thatsame old crowd that rides 'roun' here summers and thinks to be sociable bysayin' how nice an' yellow your oats is blossomin'! You could go ten times'roun' the world with them and know less 'bout what folks is like thanwhen you started. When I heard 'bout them being there, I called Eben andJoel and Em'ly off and I says, 'Now, don't pester that poor do-lesscritter with questions any more. How much do the summer folks down to th'village know 'bout the way we live?' Well, they burst out laughin', ofcourse. Well, then, ' I says, ''tis plain to be seen that all they do inwinter is to go off to some foreign part and do the same as here, ' so Isays to them, same's I said to you, Abby, a while back, that they'd bettersave their breath to cool their porridge. But it's awful solemn eatin'now, without a word spoke. "

The other woman laughed. "Why, you don't have to talk 'bout foreign partsor else keep still, do ye?"

"Oh, it's just so 'bout everythin'. We heard she'd been in Washington lastwinter, so Eben he brisked up and tried her on politics. Well, she'd neverheard of direct primaries, they're raisin' such a holler 'bout in YorkState; she didn't know what th' 'nsurgent senators are up to near as muchas we did, and to judge by the way she looked, she'd only just barelyheard of th' tariff. " The word was pronounced with true New Englandreverence. "Then we tried bringin' up children, and lumberin' an' roads, an' cookin', an' crops, an' stock, an' wages, an' schools, an' gardenin', but we couldn't touch bottom nowhere. Never a word to be had out'n her. Sowe give up and now we just sit like stotin' bottles, an' eat--an' do ourvisitin' with each other odd minutes afterward. "

"Why, she don't look to be half-witted, " said the other. 

"She ain't!" cried Mrs. Pritchard with emphasis. "She's got as good aheadpiece, natchilly, as anybody. I remember her when she was a young one. It's the fool way they're brung up! Everythin' that's any fun or intrust, they hire somebody else to do it for 'em. Here she is a great strappin'woman of twenty-two or three, with nothing in the world to do but totraipse off 'cross the fields from mornin' to night--an' nobody to needher there nor here, nor anywhere. No wonder she looks peaked. Sometimeswhen I see her set and stare off, so sort o' dull and hopeless, I'm sosorry for her I could cry! Good land! I'd as lief hire somebody to chew myvittles for me and give me the dry cud to live off of, as do the way thosekind of folks do. "

The distant call of a steam-whistle, silvered by the great distance into aflute-like note, interrupted her. "That's the milk-train, whistling forthe Millbrook cross in', " she said. "We must be thinkin' of goin' homebefore long. Where be those young ones?" She raised her voice in a call asunexpectedly strong and vibrant as her laugh. "_Susie! Eddie_! Did theyanswer? I'm gittin' that hard o' hearin' 'tis hard for me to make out. "

"Yes, they hollered back, " said the other. "An' I see 'em comin' throughthe pasture yonder. I guess they got their pails full by the way theycarry 'em. "

"That's good, " said Mrs. Pritchard with satisfaction. "They can gettwenty-five cents a quart hulled, off'n summer folks. They're savin' up tohelp Joel go to Middletown College in the fall. "

"They think a lot o' Joel, don't they?" commented the other. 

"Oh, the Pritchards has always been a family that knew how to set store bytheir own folks, " said the old woman proudly, "and Joel he'll pay 'em backas soon as he gets ahead a little. "

The children had evidently now come up, for Virginia heard congratulationsover the berries and exclamations over their sun-flushed cheeks. "Why, Susie, you look like a pickled beet in your face. Set down, child, an'cool off. Grandma called you an' Eddie down to tell you an old-timeystory. "

There was an outbreak of delighted cries from the children and Mrs. Pritchard said deprecatingly, "You know, Abby, there never was childrenyet that wasn't crazy 'bout old-timey stories. I remember how I used tohang onto Aunt Debby's skirts and beg her to tell me some more. 

"The story I'm goin' to tell you is about this Great-aunt Debby, " sheannounced formally to her auditors, "when she was 'bout fourteen years oldand lived up here in this very house, pretty soon after th' Rev'lution. There was only just a field or two cleared off 'round it then, and allover th' mounting the woods were as black as any cellar with pines andspruce. Great-aunt Debby was the oldest one of five children and mygrandfather--your great-great-grandfather--was the youngest. In them daysthere wa'n't but a few families in the valley and they lived far apart, sowhen Great-aunt Debby's father got awful sick a few days after he'd beenaway to get some grist ground, Aunt Debby's mother had to send her 'boutsix miles through th' woods to the nearest house--it stood where the oldPerkins barn is now. The man come back with Debby, but as soon as he sawgreat-grandfather he give one yell--'smallpox!'--and lit out for home. Folks was tur'ble afraid of it then an' he had seven children of his ownan' nobody for 'em to look to if he died, so you couldn't blame him none. They was all like that then, every fam'ly just barely holdin' on, an'scratchin' for dear life. 

"Well, he spread the news, and the next day, while Debby was helpin' hermother nurse her father the best she could, somebody called her overtoward th' woods. They made her stand still 'bout three rods from 'em andshouted to her that the best they could do was to see that the fam'ly hadvittles enough. The neighbors would cook up a lot and leave it every dayin the fence corner and Debbie could come and git it. 

"That was the way they fixed it. Aunt Debby said they was awful faithfuland good 'bout it and never failed, rain or shine, to leave a lot of thebest stuff they could git in them days. But before long she left some ofit there, to show they didn't need so much, because they wasn't so many toeat. 

"First, Aunt Debby's father died. Her mother an she dug the grave inth' corner of th' clearin', down there where I'm pointin'. Aunt Debby saidshe couldn't never forget how her mother looked as she said a prayerbefore they shoveled the dirt back in. Then the two of 'em took care ofthe cow and tried to get in a few garden seeds while they nursed one ofthe children--the boy that was next to Debby. That turned out to besmallpox, of course, and he died and they buried him alongside his father. Then the two youngest girls, twins they was, took sick, and before theydied Aunt Debby's mother fell over in a faint while she was tryin' tospade up the garden. Aunt Debby got her into the house and put her to bed. She never said another thing, but just died without so much as knowin'Debby. She and the twins went the same day, and Debby buried 'em in onegrave. 

"It took her all day to dig it, she said. They was afraid of wolves inthem days and had to have their graves deep. The baby, the one that was tobe my grandfather, played 'round while she was diggin', and she had tostop to milk the cow and git his meals for him. She got the bodies over tothe grave, one at a time, draggin' 'em on the wood-sled. When she wasready to shovel the dirt back in, 'twas gettin' to be twilight, and shesaid the thrushes were beginnin' to sing--she made the baby kneel down andshe got on her knees beside him and took hold of his hand to say a prayer. She was just about wore out, as you can think, and scared to death, andshe'd never known any prayer, anyhow. All she could think to say was'Lord--Lord--Lord!' And she made the baby say it, over and over. I guess'twas a good enough prayer too. When I married and come up here to live, seems as though I never heard the thrushes begin to sing in the eveningwithout I looked down there and could almost see them two on their knees. 

"Well, there she was, fourteen years old, with a two-year-old baby to lookout for, and all the rest of the family gone as though she'd dreamed 'em. She was sure she and little Eddie--you're named for him, Eddie, and don'tyou never forget it--would die, of course, like the others, but she wa'n'tany hand to give up till she had to, and she wanted to die last, so tolook out for the baby. So when she took sick she fought the smallpox justlike a wolf, she used to tell us. She had to live, to take care of Eddie. She gritted her teeth and _wouldn't_ die, though, as she always said, 'twould ha' been enough sight more comfortable than to live through whatshe did. 

"Some folks nowadays say it couldn't ha' been smallpox she had, or shecouldn't ha' managed. I don't know 'bout that. I guess 'twas plenty badenough, anyhow. She was out of her head a good share of th' time, but shenever forgot to milk the cow and give Eddie his meals. She used to fightup on her knees (there was a week when she couldn't stand without fallin'over in faint) and then crawl out to the cow-shed and sit down flat onthe ground and reach up to milk. One day the fever was so bad she wasclear crazy and she thought angels in silver shoes come right out there, in the manure an' all, and milked for her and held the cup toEddie's mouth. 

"An' one night she thought somebody, with a big black cape on, come andstood over her with a knife. She riz up in bed and told him to '_git out_!She'd _have_ to stay to take care of the baby!' And she hit at the knifeso fierce she knocked it right out'n his hand. Then she fainted away agin. She didn't come to till mornin', and when she woke up she knew she wasgoin' to live. She always said her hand was all bloody that morning from abig cut in it, and she used to show us the scar--a big one 'twas, too. ButI guess most likely that come from something else. Folks was awfulsuperstitious in them days, and Aunt Debby was always kind o' queer. 

"Well, an' so she did live and got well, though she never grew a mite fromthat time. A little wizened-up thing she was, always; but I tell you folks'round here thought a nawful lot of Aunt Debby! And Eddie, if you'llbelieve it, never took the sickness at all. They say, sometimes, babiesdon't. 

"They got a fam'ly to come and work the farm for 'em, and Debby she tookcare of her little brother, same as she always had. And he grew up and gotmarried and come to live in this house and Aunt Debby lived with him. They did set great store by each other! Grandmother used to laugh and saygrandfather and Aunt Debby didn't need no words to talk together. I waseight, goin' on nine--why, Susie, just your age--when Aunt Debby died. Iremember as well the last thing she said. Somebody asked her if she wasafraid. She looked down over the covers--I can see her now, like a oldbaby she looked, so little and so light on the big feather-bed, and shesaid, 'Is a grain o' wheat scared when you drop it in the ground?' Ialways thought that wa'n't such a bad thing for a child to hear said. 

"She'd wanted to be buried there beside the others and grandfather did itso. While he was alive he took care of the graves and kept 'em in goodorder; and after I married and come here to live I did. But I'm gettin' onnow, and I want you young folks should know 'bout it and do it after I'mgone. 

"Now, here, Susie, take this pot of petunias and set it out on the head ofthe grave that's got a stone over it. And if you're ever inclined to thinkyou have a hard time, just you remember Aunt Debby and shut your teeth and_hang on_! If you tip the pot bottom-side up, and knock on it with astone, it'll all slip out easy. Now go along with you. We've got to bestarting for home soon. "

There was a brief pause and then the cheerful voice went on: "If there'sany flower I do despise, it's petunias! But 'twas Aunt Debby's 'specialfavorite, so I always start a pot real early and have it in blossom whenher birthday comes 'round. "

By the sound she was struggling heavily to her feet. "Yes, do, forgoodness' sakes, haul me up, will ye? I'm as stiff as an old horse. I don't know what makes me so rheumaticky. My folks ain't, as ageneral thing. "

There was so long a silence that the girl inside the house wondered ifthey were gone, when Mrs. Pritchard's voice began again: "I do like tocome up here! It 'minds me of him an' me livin' here when we was young. Wehad a good time of it!"

"I never could see, " commented the other, "how you managed when he wentaway t' th' war. "

"Oh, I did the way you do when you _have_ to! I'd felt he ought to go, youknow, as much as he did, so I was willin' to put in my best licks. An' Iwas young too--twenty-three--and only two of the children born then--and Iwas as strong as a ox. I never minded the work any. 'Twas the days afterbattles, when we couldn't get no news, that was the bad part. Why, I couldgo to the very spot, over there where the butternut tree stands--'twasour garden then--where I heard he was killed at Gettysburg. "

"What did you do?" asked the other. 

"I went on hoein' my beans. There was the two children to be looked outfor, you know. But I ain't mindin' tellin' you that I can't look at abean-row since without gettin' sick to my stomach and feelin' thegoose-pimples start all over me. "

"How did you hear 'twan't so?"

"Why, I was gettin' in the hay--up there where the oaks stand was ourhay-field. I remember how sick the smell of the hay made me, and when thesweat run down into my eyes I was glad to feel 'em smart and sting--well, Abby, you just wait till you hear your Nathan'l is shot through the headand you'll know how it was--well, all of a sudden--somebody took the forkout'n my hand an'--an' said--'here, you drive an' I'll pitch '--andthere--'twas--'twas----"

"Why, Grandma Pritchard! You're----"

"No, I ain't, either; I ain't such a fool, I hope! Why, see me cry like aold numskull! Ain't it ridic'lous how you can talk 'bout deaths andburyin's all right, and can't tell of how somebody come back from thegrave without--where in th' nation is my handkerchief! Why, Abby, thingsain't never looked the same to me from that minute on. I tell you--I tellyou--_I was real glad to see him_!

"Good land, what time o' day do you suppose it can be? Susie! Eddie! Come, git your berries and start home!"

The two voices began to sound more faintly as the old woman's crutch rangon the stones. "Well, Abby, when I come up here and remember how I farmedit alone for four years, I say to myself that 'twan't only th' men thatset the slaves free. Them that stayed to home was allowed to have theirshare in the good----" The syllables blurred into an indistinguishable humand there fell again upon the house its old mantle of silence. 

As if aroused by this from an hypnotic spell, the girl on the hay sat upsuddenly, pressing her hands over her eyes; but she did not shut out athousand thronging visions. There was not a sound but the loud throbbingof the pulses at her temples; but never again could there be silence forher in that spot. The air was thick with murmurs which beat against herears. She was trembling as she slipped down from the hay and, walkingunsteadily to the door, stood looking half-wildly out into the hauntedtwilight. 

The faint sound of the brook rose liquid in the quiet evening air. 

There, where the butternut tree stood, had been the garden!

The white birches answered with a rustling stir in all their lightlypoised leaves. 

Up there, where the oaks were, had been the hay-field!

The twilight darkened. Through the forest, black on the crest of theoverhanging mountain, shone suddenly the evening star. 

There, before the door, had stood the waiting wood-sled!

The girl caught through the gathering dusk a gleam of magenta from thecorner of the clearing. 

Two hermit thrushes, distant in the forest, began to send up theirpoignant antiphonal evening chant. 

THE HEYDAY OF THE BLOOD

The older professor looked up at the assistant, fumbling fretfully with apile of papers. "Farrar, what's the _matter_ with you lately?" he saidsharply. 

The younger man started, "Why. . . Why. . . " the brusqueness of the other'smanner shocked him suddenly into confession. "I've lost my nerve, Professor Mallory, that's what the matter with me. I'm frightened todeath, " he said melodramatically. 

"What _of_?" asked Mallory, with a little challenge in his tone. 

The flood-gates were open. The younger man burst out in exclamations, waving his thin, nervous, knotted fingers, his face twitching as he spoke. "Of myself. . . No, not myself, but my body! I'm not well. . . I'm getting worseall the time. The doctors don't make out what is the matter. . . I don'tsleep . . . I worry. . . I forget things, I take no interest in life. . . Thedoctors intimate a nervous breakdown ahead of me. . . And yet I rest . . . Irest. . . More than I can afford to! I never go out. Every evening I'm in bedby nine o'clock. I take no part in college life beyond my work, for fearof the nervous strain. I've refused to take charge of that summer-schoolin New York, you know, that would be such an opportunity for me . . . If Icould only sleep! But though I never do anything exciting in theevening . . . Heavens! what nights I have. Black hours of seeing myself in asanitarium, dependent on my brother! I never . . . Why, I'm inhell . . . That's what the matter with me, a perfect hell of ignobleterror!"

He sat silent, his drawn face turned to the window. The older man lookedat him speculatively. When he spoke it was with a cheerful, casual qualityin his voice which made the other look up at him surprised. 

"You don't suppose those great friends of yours, the nerve specialists, would object to my telling you a story, do you? It's very quiet andunexciting. You're not too busy?"

"Busy! I've forgotten the meaning of the word! I don't dare to be!"

"Very well, then; I mean to carry you back to the stony little farm in theGreen Mountains, where I had the extreme good luck to be born and raised. You've heard me speak of Hillsboro; and the story is all about mygreat-grandfather, who came to live with us when I was a little boy. "

"Your great-grandfather?" said the other incredulously. "People don'tremember their great-grandfathers!"

"Oh, yes, they do, in Vermont. There was my father on one farm, and mygrandfather on another, without a thought that he was no longer young, andthere was 'gran'ther' as we called him, eighty-eight years old and justpersuaded to settle back, let his descendants take care of him, andconsent to be an old man. He had been in the War of 1812--think of that, you mushroom!--and had lost an arm and a good deal of his health there. Hehad lately begun to get a pension of twelve dollars a month, so that foran old man he was quite independent financially, as poor Vermont farmerslook at things; and he was a most extraordinary character, so that hisarrival in our family was quite an event. 

"He took precedence at once of the oldest man in the township, who wasonly eighty-four and not very bright. I can remember bragging at schoolabout Gran'ther Pendleton, who'd be eighty-nine come next Woodchuck day, and could see to read without glasses. He had been ailing all his life, ever since the fever he took in the war. He used to remark triumphantlythat he had now outlived six doctors who had each given him but a year tolive; 'and the seventh is going downhill fast, so I hear!' This last washis never-failing answer to the attempts of my conscientious mother andanxious, dutiful father to check the old man's reckless indifference toany of the rules of hygiene. 

"They were good disciplinarians with their children, and this naughty oldman, who would give his weak stomach frightful attacks of indigestion bystealing out to the pantry and devouring a whole mince pie because he hadbeen refused two pieces at the table--this rebellious, unreasonable, whimsical old madcap was an electric element in our quiet, orderly life. He insisted on going to every picnic and church sociable, where he aterecklessly of all the indigestible dainties he could lay his hands on, stood in drafts, tired himself to the verge of fainting away by playinggames with the children, and returned home, exhausted, animated, and quiteready to pay the price of a day in bed, groaning and screaming out withpain as heartily and unaffectedly as he had laughed with the pretty girlsthe evening before. 

"The climax came, however, in the middle of August, when he announced hisdesire to go to the county fair, held some fourteen miles down the valleyfrom our farm. Father never dared let gran'ther go anywhere withouthimself accompanying the old man, but he was perfectly sincere in sayingthat it was not because he could not spare a day from the haying that herefused pointblank to consider it. The doctor who had been taking care ofgran'ther since he came to live with us said that it would be crazy tothink of such a thing. He added that the wonder was that gran'ther livedat all, for his heart was all wrong, his asthma was enough to kill ayoung man, and he had no digestion; in short, if father wished to kill hisold grandfather, there was no surer way than to drive fourteen miles inthe heat of August to the noisy excitement of a county fair. 

"So father for once said 'No, ' in the tone that we children had come torecognize as final. Gran'ther grimly tied a knot in his empty sleeve--acurious, enigmatic mode of his to express strong emotion--put his one handon his cane, and his chin on his hand, and withdrew himself into thatincalculable distance from the life about him where very old people spendso many hours. 

"He did not emerge from this until one morning toward the middle offair-week, when all the rest of the family were away--father and thebigger boys on the far-off upland meadows haying, and mother and the girlsoff blackberrying. I was too little to be of any help, so I had been leftto wait on gran'ther, and to set out our lunch of bread and milk andhuckleberries. We had not been alone half an hour when gran'ther sent meto extract, from under the mattress of his bed, the wallet in which hekept his pension money. There was six dollars and forty-three cents--hecounted it over carefully, sticking out his tongue like a schoolboy doinga sum, and when he had finished he began to laugh and snap his fingers andsing out in his high, cracked old voice:

"'We're goin' to go a skylarkin'! Little Jo Mallory is going to the countyfair with his Granther Pendleton, an' he's goin' to have more fun thanever was in the world, and he--'

"'But, gran'ther, father said we mustn't!' I protested, horrified. 

"'But I say we _shall_! I was your gre't-gran'ther long before he was yourfeyther, and anyway I'm here and he's not--so, _march_! Out to the barn!'

"He took me by the collar, and, executing a shuffling fandango of triumph, he pushed me ahead of him to the stable, where old white Peggy, the onlyhorse left at home, looked at us amazed. 

"'But it'll be twenty-eight miles, and Peg's never driven over eight!' Icried, my old-established world of rules and orders reeling before myeyes. 

"'Eight--and--twenty-eight! But I--am--_eighty-eight_!'

"Gran'ther improvised a sort of whooping chant of scorn as he pulled theharness from the peg. 'It'll do her good to drink some pink lemonade--oldPeggy! An' if she gits tired comin' home, I'll git out and carry her partway myself!'

"His adventurous spirit was irresistible. I made no further objection, andwe hitched up together, I standing on a chair to fix the check-rein, andgran'ther doing wonders with his one hand. Then, just as wewere--gran'ther in a hickory shirt, and with an old hat flapping over hiswizened face, I bare-legged, in ragged old clothes--so we drove out of thegrassy yard, down the steep, stony hill that led to the main valley road, and along the hot, white turnpike, deep with the dust which had beenstirred up by the teams on their way to the fair. Gran'ther sniffed theair jubilantly, and exchanged hilarious greetings with the people whoconstantly overtook old Peg's jogging trot. Between times he regaled mewith spicy stories of the hundreds of thousands--they seemed no lessnumerous to me then--of county fairs he had attended in his youth. He washorrified to find that I had never been even to one. 

"'Why, Joey, how old be ye? 'Most eight, ain't it? When I was your age Ihad run away and been to two fairs an' a hangin'. ' "'But didn't they lickyou when you got home?' I asked shudderingly. 

"'You _bet_ they did!' cried gran'ther with gusto. 

"I felt the world changing into an infinitely larger place with every wordhe said. 

"'Now, this is somethin' _like_!' he exclaimed, as we drew near toGranville and fell into a procession of wagons all filled with countrypeople in their best clothes, who looked with friendly curiosity at thelittle, shriveled cripple, his face shining with perspiring animation, andat the little boy beside him, his bare feet dangling high above the floorof the battered buckboard, overcome with the responsibility of driving ahorse for the first time in his life, and filled with such a flood of newemotions and ideas that he must have been quite pale. "

Professor Mallory leaned back and laughed aloud at the vision he had beenevoking--laughed with so joyous a relish in his reminiscences that thedrawn, impatient face of his listener relaxed a little. He drew a longbreath, he even smiled a little absently. 

"Oh, that was a day!" went on the professor, still laughing and wiping hiseyes. "Never will I have such another! At the entrance to the groundsgran'ther stopped me while he solemnly untied the knot in his emptysleeve. I don't know what kind of hairbrained vow he had tied up in it, but with the little ceremony disappeared every trace of restraint, and weplunged head over ears into the saturnalia of delights that was anold-time county fair. 

"People had little cash in those days, and gran'ther's six dollars andforty-three cents lasted like the widow's cruse of oil. We went to see thefat lady, who, if she was really as big as she looked to me then, musthave weighed at least a ton. My admiration for gran'ther's daredevilqualities rose to infinity when he entered into free-and-easy talk withher, about how much she ate, and could she raise her arms enough to do upher own hair, and how many yards of velvet it took to make her gorgeous, gold-trimmed robe. She laughed a great deal at us, but she was evidentlytouched by his human interest, for she confided to him that it was notvelvet at all, but furniture covering; and when we went away she pressedon us a bag of peanuts. She said she had more peanuts than she couldeat--a state of unbridled opulence which fitted in for me with all theother superlatives of that day. 

"We saw the dog-faced boy, whom we did not like at all; gran'therexpressing, with a candidly outspoken cynicism, his belief that 'themwhiskers was glued to him. ' We wandered about the stock exhibit, gazing atthe monstrous oxen, and hanging over the railings where the prize pigslived to scratch their backs. In order to miss nothing, we evenconscientiously passed through the Woman's Building, where we were verymuch bored by the serried ranks of preserve jars. 

"'Sufferin' Hezekiah!' cried gran'ther irritably 'Who cares how gooseberryjel _looks_. If they'd give a felly a taste, now--'

"This reminded him that we were hungry, and we went to a restaurant undera tent, where, after taking stock of the wealth that yet remained ofgran'ther's hoard, he ordered the most expensive things on the bill offare. "

Professor Mallory suddenly laughed out again. "Perhaps in heaven, butcertainly not until then, shall I ever taste anything so ambrosial as thatfried chicken and coffee ice-cream! I have not lived in vain that I havesuch a memory back of me!"

This time the younger man laughed with the narrator, settling back in hischair as the professor went on:

"After lunch we rode on the merry-go-round, both of us, gran'ther clingingdesperately with his one hand to his red camel's wooden hump, and cryingout shrilly to me to be sure and not lose his cane. The merry-go-round hadjust come in at that time, and gran'ther had never experienced it before. After the first giddy flight we retired to a lemonade-stand to exchangeimpressions, and finding that we both alike had fallen completely underthe spell of the new sensation, gran'ther said that we 'sh'd keep ona-ridin' till we'd had enough! King Solomon couldn't tell when we'd evergit a chance again!' So we returned to the charge, and rode and rode androde, through blinding clouds of happy excitement, so it seems to me now, such as I was never to know again. The sweat was pouring off from us, andwe had tried all the different animals on the machine before we could tearourselves away to follow the crowd to the race-track. 

"We took reserved seats, which cost a quarter apiece, instead of theunshaded ten-cent benches, and gran'ther began at once to pour out to me aflood of horse-talk and knowing race-track aphorisms, which finally made ayoung fellow sitting next to us laugh superciliously. Gran'ther turned onhim heatedly. 

"'I bet-che fifty cents I pick the winner in the next race!' he saidsportily, "'Done!' said the other, still laughing. 

"Gran'ther picked a big black mare, who came in almost last, but he didnot flinch. As he paid over the half-dollar he said: 'Everybody's likelyto make mistakes about _some_ things; King Solomon was a fool in the headabout women-folks! I bet-che a dollar I pick the winner in _this_ race!'and 'Done!' said the disagreeable young man, still laughing. I gasped, forI knew we had only eighty-seven cents left, but gran'ther shot me acommand to silence out of the corner of his eyes, and announced that hebet on the sorrel gelding. 

"If I live to be a hundred and break the bank at Monte Carlo three times aweek, " said Mallory, shaking his head reminiscently, "I could not know atenth part of the frantic excitement of that race or of the mad triumphwhen our horse won. Gran'ther cast his hat upon the ground, screaming likea steam-calliope with exultation as the sorrel swept past the judges'stand ahead of all the others, and I jumped up and down in an agony ofdelight which was almost more than my little body could hold. 

"After that we went away, feeling that the world could hold nothing moreglorious. It was five o'clock and we decided to start back. We paid forPeggy's dinner out of the dollar we had won on the race--I say 'we, ' forby that time we were welded into one organism--and we still had a dollarand a quarter left. 'While ye're about it, always go the whole hog!' saidgran'ther and we spent twenty minutes in laying out that money in trinketsfor all the folks at home. Then, dusty, penniless, laden with bundles, webestowed our exhausted bodies and our uplifted hearts in the oldbuckboard, and turned Peg's head toward the mountains. We did not talkmuch during that drive, and though I thought at the time only of thecarnival of joy we had left, I can now recall every detail of thetrip--how the sun sank behind Indian Mountain, a peak I had known beforeonly through distant views; then, as we journeyed on, how the stars cameout above Hemlock Mountain--our own home mountain behind our house, andlater, how the fireflies filled the darkening meadows along the riverbelow us, so that we seemed to be floating between the steady stars ofheaven and their dancing, twinkling reflection in the valley. 

"Gran'ther's dauntless spirit still surrounded me. I put out of minddoubts of our reception at home, and lost myself in delightful ruminatingson the splendors of the day. At first, every once in a while, gran'thermade a brief remark, such as, ''Twas the hind-quarters of the sorrel I beton. He was the only one in the hull kit and bilin' of 'em that hisquarters didn't fall away'; or, 'You needn't tell _me_ that them Siamesetwins ain't unpinned every night as separate as you and me!' But later on, as the damp evening air began to bring on his asthma, he subsided intosilence, only broken by great gasping coughs. 

"These were heard by the anxious, heart-sick watchers at home, and, as oldPeg stumbled wearily up the hill, father came running down to meet us. 'Where you be'n?' he demanded, his face pale and stern in the light of hislantern. 'We be'n to the county fair!' croaked gran'ther with a last flareof triumph, and fell over sideways against me. Old Peg stopped short, hanging her head as if she, too, were at the limit of her strength. I wasfrightfully tired myself, and frozen with terror of what father would say. Gran'ther's collapse was the last straw. I began to cry loudly, but fatherignored my distress with an indifference which cut me to the heart. Helifted gran'ther out of the buckboard, carrying the unconscious little oldbody into the house without a glance backward at me. But when I crawleddown to the ground, sobbing and digging my fists into my eyes, I feltmother's arms close around me. 

"'Oh, poor, naughty little Joey!' she said. 'Mother's bad, dear littleboy!'"

Professor Mallory stopped short. 

"Perhaps that's something else I'll know again in heaven, " he saidsoberly, and waited a moment before he went on: "Well, that was the end ofour day. I was so worn out that I fell asleep over my supper, in spite ofthe excitement in the house about sending for a doctor for gran'ther, whowas, so one of my awe-struck sisters told me, having some kind of 'fits, 'Mother must have put me to bed, for the next thing I remember, she wasshaking me by the shoulder and saying, 'Wake up, Joey Yourgreat-grandfather wants to speak to you. He's been suffering terribly allnight, and the doctor think's he's dying. '

"I followed her into gran'ther's room, where the family was assembledabout the bed. Gran'ther lay drawn up in a ball, groaning so dreadfullythat I felt a chill like cold water at the roots of my hair; but a momentor two after I came in, all at once he gave a great sigh and relaxed, stretching out his legs and laying his arms down on the coverlid. Helooked at me and attempted a smile. 

"Well, it was wuth it, warn't it, Joey?" he said gallantly, and closed hiseyes peacefully to sleep. 

"Did he die?" asked the younger professor, leaning forward eagerly. 

"Die? Gran'ther Pendleton? Not much! He came tottering down to breakfastthe next morning, as white as an old ghost, with no voice left, his legstrembling under him, but he kept the whole family an hour and a half atthe table, telling them in a loud whisper all about the fair, until fathersaid really he would have to take us to the one next year. Afterward hesat out on the porch watching old Peg graze around the yard. I thought hewas in one of his absent-minded fits, but when I came out, he called me tohim, and, setting his lips to my ear, he whispered:

"'An' the seventh is a-goin' down-hill fast, so I hear!' He chuckled tohimself over this for some time, wagging his head feebly, and then hesaid: 'I tell ye, Joey, I've lived a long time, and I've larned a lotabout the way folks is made. The trouble with most of 'em is, they'refraid-cats! As Jeroboam Warner used to say--he was in the same rigimentwith me in 1812--the only way to manage this business of livin' is to givea whoop and let her rip! If ye just about half-live, ye just the same ashalf-die; and if ye spend yer time half-dyin', some day ye turn in and dieall over, without rightly meanin' to at all--just a kind o' bad habitye've got yerself inter. ' Gran'ther fell into a meditative silence for amoment. 'Jeroboam, he said that the evenin' before the battle of Lundy'sLane, and he got killed the next day. Some live, and some die; but folksthat live all over die happy, anyhow! Now I tell you what's my motto, an'what I've lived to be eighty-eight on--'"

Professor Mallory stood up and, towering over the younger man, struck onehand into the other as he cried: "This was the motto he told me: 'Livewhile you live, and then die and be done with it!'"

AS A BIRD OUT OF THE SNARE

After the bargain was completed and the timber merchant had gone away, Jehiel Hawthorn walked stiffly to the pine-tree and put his horny old fistagainst it, looking up to its spreading top with an expression of hostileexultation in his face. The neighbor who had been called to witness thetransfer of Jehiel's woodland looked at him curiously. 

"That was quite a sight of money to come in without your expectin', wa'n'tit?" he said, fumbling awkwardly for an opening to the question he burnedto ask. 

Jehiel did not answer. The two old men stood silent, looking down thevalley, lying like a crevasse in a glacier between the towering whitemountains. The sinuous course of the frozen river was almost black underthe slaty sky of March. 

"Seems kind o' providential, havin' so much money come to you just now, when your sister-in-law's jest died, and left you the first time in yourlife without anybody you got to stay and see to, don't it?" commented theneighbor persistently. 

Jehiel made a vague sign with his head. 

"I s'pose likely you'll be startin' aout to travel and see foreign parts, same's you've always planned, won't you--or maybe you cal'late you be tooold now?"

Jehiel gave no indication that he had heard. His faded old blue eyes werefixed steadily on the single crack in the rampart of mountains, throughwhich the afternoon train was just now leaving the valley. Its whistleechoed back hollowly, as it fled away from the prison walls into the greatworld. 

The neighbor stiffened in offended pride. "I bid you good-night, Mr. Hawthorn, " he said severely, and stumped down the steep, narrow roadleading to the highway in the valley. 

After he had disappeared Jehiel turned to the tree and leaned his foreheadagainst it. He was so still he seemed a part of the great pine. He stoodso till the piercing chill of evening chilled him through, and when helooked again about him it was after he had lived his life all through in abrief and bitter review. 

It began with the tree and it ended with the tree, and in spite of thefever of unrest in his heart it was as stationary as any rooted creatureof the woods. When he was eleven and his father went away to the CivilWar, he had watched him out of sight with no sorrow, only a burning envyof the wanderings that lay before the soldier. A little later, when it wasdecided that he should go to stay with his married sister, since she wasleft alone by her husband's departure to the war, he turned his back onhis home with none of a child's usual reluctance, but with an eagerdelight in the day-long drive to the other end of the valley. That was thelongest journey he had ever taken, the man of almost three-score thought, with an aching resentment against Fate. 

Still, those years with his sister, filled with labor beyond his age asthey were, had been the happiest of his life. In an almost completeisolation the two had toiled together five years, the most impressionableof his life; and all his affection centered on the silent, loving, alwayscomprehending sister. His own father and mother grew to seem far away andalien, and his sister came to be like a part of himself. To her alone ofall living souls had he spoken freely of his passion for adventuring farfrom home, which devoured, his boy-soul. He was six-teen when her husbandfinally came back from the war, and he had no secrets from the youngmatron of twenty-six, who listened with such wide tender eyes of sympathyto his half-frantic outpourings of longing to escape from the dark, narrowvalley where his fathers had lived their dark, narrow lives. 

The day before he went back to his own home, now so strange to him, he wasout with her, searching for some lost turkey-chicks, and found one withits foot caught in a tangle of rusty wire. The little creature had beatenitself almost to death in its struggle to get away. Kneeling in the grass, and feeling the wild palpitations of its heart under his rescuing hand, hehad called to his sister, "Oh, look! Poor thing! It's 'most dead, and yetit ain't really hurt a mite, only desperate, over bein' held fast. " Hisvoice broke in a sudden wave of sympathy: "Oh, ain't it _terrible_ to feelso!"

For a moment the young mother put her little son aside and looked at herbrother with brooding eyes. A little later she said with apparentirrelevance, "Jehiel, as soon as you're a man grown, I'll help you to getoff. You shall be a sailor, if you like, and go around the world, andbring back coral to baby and me. "

A chilling premonition fell on the lad. "I don't believe it!" he said, with tears in his eyes. "I just believe I've got to stay here in this holeall my life. "

His sister looked off at the tops of the trees. Finally, "Surely He shalldeliver thee from the snare of the fowler, " she quoted dreamily. 

When she came to see him and their parents a few months later, she broughthim a little square of crimson silk, on which she had worked in tinystitches, "Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler. " Sheexplained to her father and mother that it was a "text-ornament" forJehiel to hang up over his desk; but she drew the boy aside and showed himthat the silk was only lightly caught down to the foundation. 

"Underneath is another text, " she said, "and when your day of freedomcomes I want you should promise me to cut the stitches, turn back thesilk, and take the second text for your motto, so you'll remember to beproperly grateful. This is the second text. " She put her hands on hisshoulders and said in a loud, exultant voice, "My soul is escaped as abird out of the snare of the fowler. The snare is broken and I amescaped. "

For answer the boy pulled her eagerly to the window and pointed to a youngpine-tree that stood near the house. 

"Sister, that tree's just as old as I be. I've prayed to God, and I'vepromised myself that before it's as tall, as the ridge-pole of the house, I'll be on my way. "

As this scene came before his eyes, the white-haired man, leaning againstthe great pine, looked up at the lofty crown of green wreathing thegiant's head and shook his fist at it. He hated every inch of its height, for every inch meant an enforced renunciation that had brought himbitterness and a sense of failure. 

His sister had died the year after she had given him the double text, andhis father the year after that. He was left thus, the sole support of hisailing mother, who transferred to the silent, sullen boy the irresistiblerule of complaining weakness with which she had governed his father. Itwas thought she could not live long, and the boy stood in terror of asudden death brought on by displeasure at some act of his. In the end, however, she died quietly in her bed, an old woman of seventy-three, nursed by her daughter-in-law, the widow of Jehiel's only brother. Herplace in the house was taken by Jehiel's sister-in-law, a sickly, helplesswoman, alone in the would except for Jehiel, and all the neighborscongratulated him on having a housekeeper ready to his hand. He saidnothing. 

By that time, indeed, he had sunk into a harsh silence on all topics. Hewent through the exhausting routine of farming with an iron-likeendurance, watched with set lips the morning and afternoon trains leavethe valley, and noted the growth of the pine-tree with a burning heart. His only recreation was collecting time-tables, prospectuses of steamshipcompanies, and what few books of travel he could afford. The only societyhe did not shun was that of itinerant peddlers or tramps, and occasionallya returned missionary on a lecture tour. 

And always the pine-tree had grown, insolent in the pride of a creatureset in the right surroundings. The imprisoned man had felt himself dwarfedby its height. But now, he looked up at it again, and laughed aloud. Ithad come late, but it had come. He was fifty-seven years old, almostthree-score, but all his life was still to be lived. He said to himselfthat some folks lived their lives while they did their work, but he haddone all his tasks first, and now he could live. The unexpected arrival ofthe timber merchant and the sale of that piece of land he'd never thoughtwould bring him a cent--was not that an evident sign that Providence waswith him. He was too old and broken now to work his way about as he hadplanned at first, but here had come this six hundred dollars like rainfrom the sky. He would start as soon as he could sell his stock. 

The thought reminded him of his evening chores, and he set off for thebarn with a fierce jubilation that it was almost the last time he wouldneed to milk. How far he wondered, could he go on that money? He hurriedthrough his work and into the house to his old desk. The fadedtext-ornament stood on the top shelf, but he did not see it, as he hastilytumbled out all the time tables and sailing-lists. The habit of looking atthem with the yearning bitterness of unreconciled deprivation was still sostrong on him that even as he handled them eagerly, he hated them for theassociations of years of misery they brought back to him. 

Where should he go? He was dazed by the unlimited possibilities beforehim. To Boston first, as the nearest seaport. He had taken the trip in hismind so many times that he knew the exact minute when the train wouldcross the State line and he would be really escaped from the net which hadbound him all his life. From Boston to Jamaica as the nearest place thatwas quite quite different from Vermont. He had no desire to see Europe orEngland. Life there was too much like what he had known. He wanted to bein a country where nothing should remind him of his past. From Jamaicawhere? His stiff old fingers painfully traced out a steamship line to theIsthmus and thence to Colombia. He knew nothing about that country. Allthe better. It would be the more foreign. Only this he knew, that nobodyin that tropical country "farmed it, " and that was where he wanted to go. From Colombia around the Cape to Argentina. He was aghast at the cost, butinstantly decided that he would go steerage. There would be more realforeigners to be seen that way, and his money would go twice as far. 

To Buenos Ayres, then. He did not even attempt to pronounce this name, though its strange, inexplicable look on the page was a joy to him. Fromthere by muleback and afoot over the Andes to Chile. He knew somethingabout that trip. A woman who had taught in the Methodist missionary schoolin Santiago de Chile had taken that journey, and he had heard her give alecture on it. He was the sexton of the church and heard all the lecturesfree. At Santiago de Chile (he pronounced it with a strange distortion ofthe school-teacher's bad accent) he would stay for a while and just liveand decide what to do next. His head swam with dreams and visions, and hisheart thumped heavily against his old ribs. The clock striking ten broughthim back to reality. He stood up with a gesture of exultation almostfierce. "That's just the time when the train crosses the State line!" hesaid. 

He slept hardly at all that night, waking with great starts, and imagininghimself in strange foreign places, and then recognizing with a scornfulfamiliarity the worn old pieces of furniture in his room. He noticed atthese times that it was very cold, and lifelong habit made him reflectthat he would better go early to the church because it would be hard toget up steam enough to warm the building before time for service. After hehad finished his morning chores and was about to start he noticed that thethermometer stood at four above zero. 

That was certainly winter temperature; the snow lay like a heavy shroud onall the dead valley, but the strange blind instinct of a man who has livedclose to the earth stirred within him. He looked at the sky and themountains and held up his bare palm. "I shouldn't be surprised if thespring break-up was near, " he said. "I guess this is about the last winterday we'll get. "

The church was icy cold, and he toiled in the cellar, stuffing wood intothe flaming maw of the steam-heater, till it was time to ring the bell. Ashe gave the last stroke, Deacon Bradley approached him. "Jehiel, I've gota little job of repairing I want you should do at my store, " he said inthe loud, slow speech of a man important in the community. "Come to thestore to-morrow morning and see about it. " He passed on into his pew, which was at the back of the church near a steam radiator, so that he waswarm, no matter what the weather was. 

Jehiel Hawthorn went out and stood on the front steps in the wintersunshine and his heart swelled exultingly as he looked across at thedeacon's store. "I wish I'd had time to tell him I'd do no repairs for himto-morrow, nor any time---that I'm going to travel and see the world. "

The last comers disappeared in the church and the sound of singing camefaintly to Jehiel's ears. Although he was the sexton he rarely was inchurch for the service, using his duties as an excuse for absence. He feltthat it was not for him to take part in prayer and thanksgiving. As a boyhe had prayed for the one thing he wanted, and what had it come to?

A penetrating cold wind swept around the corner and he turned to go insideto see about the steam-pipes. In the outer hall he noticed that theservice had progressed to the responsive readings. As he opened the doorof the church the minister read rapidly, "Praised be the Lord who hath notgiven us over for a prey unto their teeth. "

The congregation responded in a timid inarticulate gabble, above whichrose Deacon Bradley's loud voice, --"Our soul is escaped even as a bird outof the snare of the fowler. The snare is broken and we are escaped. " Heread the responses in a slow, booming roar, at least half a sentencebehind the rest, but the minister always waited for him. As he finished, he saw the sexton standing in the open door. "A little more steam, Jehiel, " he added commandingly, running the words on to the end of thetext. 

Jehiel turned away silently, but as he stumbled through the dark, unfinished part of the cellar he thought to himself, "Well, that's thelast time he'll give me an order for _one_ while!"

Then the words of the text he had heard came back to his mind with ahalf-superstitious shock at the coincidence. He had forgotten all aboutthat hidden part of the text-ornament. Why, now that had come true! Heought to have cut the stitches and torn off the old text last night. Hewould, as soon as he went home. He wished his sister were alive to know, and suddenly, there in the dark, he wondered if perhaps she did know. 

As he passed the door to the rooms of the Ladies' Auxiliary Society henoticed that it was ajar, and saw through the crack that there was asleeping figure on the floor near the stove--a boy about sixteen. WhenJehiel stepped softly in and looked at him, the likeness to his own sisterstruck him even before he recognized the lad as his great-nephew, the sonof the child he had helped his sister to care for all those years ago. 

"Why, what's Nathaniel doin' here?" he asked himself, in surprise. He hadnot known that the boy was even in town, for he had been on the point ofleaving to enlist in the navy. Family matters could not have detained him, for he was quite alone in the world since both his father and his motherwere dead and his stepmother had married again. Under his great-uncle'sgaze the lad opened his eyes with a start and sat up confused. 

"What's the matter with you, Nat?" asked the older man not ungently. Hewas thinking that probably he had looked like that at sixteen. The boystared at him a moment, and then, leaning his head on a chair, he began tocry. Sitting thus, crouched together, he looked like a child. 

"Why, Natty, what's the trouble?" asked his uncle alarmed. 

"I came off here because I couldn't hold in at home any longer, " answeredthe other between sobs. "You see I can't go away. Her husband treats herso bad she can't stay with him. I don't blame her, she says she just_can't!_ So she's come back and she ain't well, and she's goin' to have ababy, and I've got to stay and support her. Mr. Bradley's offered me aplace in his store and I've got to give up goin' to the navy. " He suddenlyrealized the unmanliness of his attitude, rose to his feet, closing hislips tightly, and faced the older man with a resolute expression ofdespair in his young eyes. 

"Uncle Jehiel, it does seem to me I _can't_ have it so! All my life I'velooked forward to bein' a sailor and goin' around the world, and all. Ijust hate the valley and the mountains! But I guess I got to stay. She'sonly my stepmother, I know, but she was always awful good to me, and shehasn't got anybody else to look after her. "

His voice broke, and he put his arm up in a crook over his face. "But it'sawful hard! I feel like a bird that's got caught in a snare. "

His uncle had grown very pale during this speech, and at the last words herecoiled with an exclamation of horror. There was a silence in which helooked at his nephew with the wide eyes of a man who sees a specter. Thenhe turned away into the furnace-room, and picking up his lunch-box broughtit back. "Here, you, " he said roughly, "part of what's troublin' you isthat you ain't had any breakfast. You eat this and you'll feel better. I'll be back in a minute. "

He went away blindly into the darkest part of the cellar. It was veryblack there, but his eyes stared wide before him. It was very cold, butdrops of sweat stood on his forehead as if he were in the hay-field. Hewas alone, but his lips moved from time to time, and once he called out insome loud, stifled exclamation which resounded hollowly in the vault-likeplace. He was there a long time. 

When he went back into the furnace cellar, he found Nathaniel sittingbefore the fire. The food and warmth had brought a little color into hispale face, but it was still set in a mask of tragic desolation. 

As his uncle came in, he exclaimed, "Why, Uncle Jehiel, you look awfulbad. Are you sick?"

"Yes, I be, " said the other harshly, "but 'tain't nothin'. It'll passafter a while. Nathaniel, I've thought of a way you can manage. You knowyour uncle's wife died this last week and that leaves me without any housekeeper. What if your stepmother sh'd come and take care of me and I'lltake care of her. I've just sold a piece of timber land I never thought toget a cent out of and that'll ease things up so we can hire help if sheain't strong enough to do the work. "

Nathaniel's face flushed in a relief which died quickly down to a somberhopelessness. He faced his uncle doggedly. "Not _much_, Uncle Jehiel!" hesaid heavily, "I ain't a-goin' to hear to such a thing. I know all aboutyour wantin' to get away from the valley--you take that money and goyourself and I'll---"

Hopelessness and resolution were alike struck out of his face by the furyof benevolence with which the old man cut him short. "Don't you dare tospeak a word against it, boy!" cried Jehiel in a labored anguish. "GoodLord! I'm only doin' it for you because I _have_ to! I've been throughwhat you're layin' out for yourself an' stood it, somehow, an' now I'm'most done with it all. But 'twould be like beginnin' it all again to seeyou startin' in. "

The boy tried to speak, but he raised his voice. "No, I couldn't stand itall over again. 'Twould cut in to the places where I've got calloused. "Seeing through the other's stupor the beginnings of an irresoluteopposition, he flung himself upon him in a strange and incredible appeal, crying out, "Oh, you must! You _got_ to go!" commanding and imploring inthe same incoherent sentence, struggling for speech, and then hanging onNathaniel's answer in a sudden wild silence. It was as though his nextbreath depended on the boy's decision. 

It was very still in the twilight where they stood. The faint murmur of aprayer came down from above, and while it lasted both were as though heldmotionless by its mesmeric monotony. Then, at the boom of the organ, thelad's last shred of self-control vanished. He burst again into muffledweary sobs, the light from the furnace glistening redly on his streamingcheeks. "It ain't right, Uncle Jehiel. I feel as though I was murderin'somethin'! But I can't help it. I'll go, I'll do as you say, but----"

His uncle's agitation went out like a wind-blown flame. He, too, droopedin an utter fatigue. "Never mind, Natty, " he said tremulously, "it'll allcome out right somehow. Just you do as Uncle Jehiel says. "

A trampling upstairs told him that the service was over. "You run home nowand tell her I'll be over this afternoon to fix things up. "

He hurried up the stairs to open the front doors, but Deacon Bradley wasbefore him. "You're late, Jehiel, " he said severely, "and the church wascold. "

"I know, Deacon, " said the sexton humbly, "but it won't happen again. AndI'll be around the first thing in the morning to do that job for you. " Hisvoice sounded dull and lifeless. 

"What's the matter?" asked the deacon. "Be you sick?"

"Yes, I be, but 'tain't nothin'. 'Twill pass after a while. "

That evening, as he walked home after service, he told himself that he hadnever known so long a day. It seemed longer than all the rest of his life. Indeed he felt that some strange and racking change had come upon himsince the morning, as though he were not the same person, as though he hadbeen away on a long journey, and saw all things with changed eyes. "I feelas though I'd died, " he thought with surprise, "and was dead and buried. "

This brought back to his mind the only bitter word he had spokenthroughout the endless day. Nathaniel had said, as an excuse for his haste(Jehiel insisted on his leaving that night), "You see, mother, it's reallya service to Uncle Jehiel, since he's got nobody to keep house for him. "He had added, in the transparent self-justification of selfish youth, "AndI'll pay it back to him every cent. " At this Jehiel had said shortly, "Bythe time you can pay it back what I'll need most will be a tombstone. Gita big one so's to keep me down there quiet. "

But now, walking home under the frosty stars, he felt very quiet already, as though he needed no weight to lie heavy on his restless heart. It didnot seem restless now, but very still, as though it too were dead. Henoticed that the air was milder, and as he crossed the bridge below hishouse he stopped and listened. Yes, the fine ear of his experience caughta faint grinding sound. By tomorrow the river would begin to break up. Itwas the end of winter. He surprised himself by his pleasure in thinking ofthe spring. 

Before he went into the house after his evening chores were done, hestopped for a moment and looked back at the cleft in the mountain wallthrough which the railroad left the valley. He had been looking longinglytoward that door of escape all his life, and now he said goodby to it. "Ah, well, 'twan't to be, " he said, with an accent of weary finality; butthen, suddenly out of the chill which oppressed his heart there sprang alast searing blast of astonished anguish. It was as if he realized for thefirst time all that had befallen him since the morning. He was racked by ahorrified desolation that made his sturdy old body stagger as if under anunexpected blow. As he reeled he flung his arm about the pine-tree and sostood for a time, shaking in a paroxysm which left him breathless when itpassed. For it passed as suddenly as it came. He lifted his head andlooked again at the great cleft in the mountains, with new eyes. Somehow, insensibly, his heart had been emptied of its fiery draught by more thanmere exhaustion. The old bitter pain was gone, but there was no mere voidin its place. He felt the sweet, weak light-headedness of a man in hisfirst lucid period after a fever, tears stinging his eyelids in confusedthanksgiving for an unrecognized respite from pain. 

He looked up at the lofty crown of the pine-tree, through which shone oneor two of the brightest stars, and felt a new comradeship with it. It wasa great tree, he thought, and they had grown up together. He laid hishardened palm on it, and fancied that he caught a throb of the silentvitality under the bark. How many kinds of life there were! Under itswhite shroud, how all the valley lived. The tree stretching up its head tothe stars, the river preparing to throw off the icy armor which compressedits heart--they were all awakening in their own way. The river had beenrestless, like himself, the tree had been tranquil, but they passedtogether through the resurrection into quiet life. 

When he went into the house, he found that he was almost fainting withfatigue. He sat down by the desk, and his head fell forward on the pile ofpamphlets he had left there. For the first time in his life he thought ofthem without a sore heart. "I suppose Natty'll go to every one of themplaces, " he murmured as he dropped to sleep. 

He dreamed strange, troubled dreams that melted away before he could seizeon them, and finally he thought his sister stood before him and called. The impression was so vivid that he started up, staring at the empty room. For an instant he still thought he heard a voice, and then he knew it wasthe old clock striking the hour. It was ten o'clock. 

"Natty's just a-crossin' the State line, " he said aloud The text-ornamentcaught his eye. Still half asleep, with his sister's long-forgotten voiceringing in his ears, he remembered vaguely that he had meant to bring thesecond text to light. For a moment he hesitated, and then, "Well, it'scome true for Natty, anyhow, " he thought. 

And clumsily using his heavy jackknife, he began to cut the tiny stitcheswhich had so long hidden from his eyes the joyous exultation of theescaped prisoner. 

THE BEDQUILT

Of all the Elwell family Aunt Mehetabel was certainly the most unimportantmember. It was in the New England days, when an unmarried woman was an oldmaid at twenty, at forty was everyone's servant, and at sixty had gonethrough so much discipline that she could need no more in the next world. Aunt Mehetabel was sixty-eight. 

She had never for a moment known the pleasure of being important toanyone. Not that she was useless in her Brother's family; she wasexpected, as a matter of course, to take upon herself the most tedious anduninteresting part of the household labors. On Mondays she accepted as hershare the washing of the men's shirts, heavy with sweat and stiff withdirt from the fields and from their own hard-working bodies. Tuesdays shenever dreamed of being allowed to iron anything pretty or eveninteresting, like the baby's white dresses or the fancy aprons of heryoung lady nieces. She stood all day pressing out a tiresome monotonoussuccession of dish-cloths and towels and sheets. 

In preserving-time she was allowed to have none of the pleasantresponsibility of deciding when the fruit had cooked long enough, nor didshe share in the little excitement of pouring the sweet-smelling stuffinto the stone jars. She sat in a corner with the children and stonedcherries incessantly, or hulled strawberries until her fingers were dyedred to the bone. 

The Elwells were not consciously unkind to their aunt, they were even in avague way fond of her; but she was so utterly insignificant a figure intheir lives that they bestowed no thought whatever on her. Aunt Mehetabeldid not resent this treatment; she took it quite as unconsciously as theygave it. It was to be expected when one was an old-maid dependent in abusy family. She gathered what crumbs of comfort she could from theiroccasional careless kindnesses and tried to hide the hurt which even yetpierced her at her brother's rough joking. In the winter when they all satbefore the big hearth, roasted apples, drank mulled cider, and teased thegirls about their beaux and the boys about their sweethearts, she shrankinto a dusky corner with her knitting, happy if the evening passed withouther brother saying, with a crude sarcasm, "Ask your Aunt Mehetabel aboutthe beaux that used to come a-sparkin' her!" or, "Mehetabel, how was'twhen you was in love with Abel Cummings. " As a matter of fact, she hadbeen the same at twenty as at sixty, a quiet, mouse-like little creature, too timid and shy for anyone to notice, or to raise her eyes for a momentand wish for a life of her own. 

Her sister-in-law, a big hearty housewife, who ruled indoors with asautocratic a sway as did her husband on the farm, was rather kind in anabsent, offhand way to the shrunken little old woman, and it was throughher that Mehetabel was able to enjoy the one pleasure of her life. Even asa girl she had been clever with her needle in the way of patchingbedquilts. More than that she could never learn to do. The garments whichshe made for herself were the most lamentable affairs, and she was humblygrateful for any help in the bewildering business of putting themtogether. But in patchwork she enjoyed a tepid importance. She couldreally do that as well as anyone else. During years of devotion to thisone art she had accumulated a considerable store of quilting patterns. Sometimes the neighbors would send over and ask "Miss Mehetabel" for suchand such a design. It was with an agreeable flutter at being able to helpsomeone that she went to the dresser, in her bare little room under theeaves, and extracted from her crowded portfolio the pattern desired. 

She never knew how her great idea came to her. Sometimes she thought shemust have dreamed it, sometimes she even wondered reverently, in thephraseology of the weekly prayer-meeting, if it had not been "sent" toher. She never admitted to herself that she could have thought of itwithout other help; it was too great, too ambitious, too lofty a projectfor her humble mind to have conceived. Even when she finished drawing thedesign with her own fingers, she gazed at it incredulously, not daring tobelieve that it could indeed be her handiwork. At first it seemed to heronly like a lovely but quite unreal dream. She did not think of putting itinto execution--so elaborate, so complicated, so beautifully difficult apattern could be only for the angels in heaven to quilt. But so curiouslydoes familiarity accustom us even to very wonderful things, that as shelived with this astonishing creation of her mind, the longing grewstronger and stronger to give it material life with her nimble oldfingers. 

She gasped at her daring when this idea first swept over her and put itaway as one does a sinfully selfish notion, but she kept coming back to itagain and again. Finally she said compromisingly to herself that she wouldmake one "square, " just one part of her design, to see how it would look. Accustomed to the most complete dependence on her brother and his wife, she dared not do even this without asking Sophia's permission. With aheart full of hope and fear thumping furiously against her old ribs, sheapproached the mistress of the house on churning-day, knowing with theinnocent guile of a child that the country woman was apt to be in a goodtemper while working over the fragrant butter in the cool cellar. 

Sophia listened absently to her sister-in-law's halting, hesitatingpetition. "Why, yes, Mehetabel, " she said, leaning far down into the hugechurn for the last golden morsels--"why, yes, start another quilt if youwant to. I've got a lot of pieces from the spring sewing that will work inreal good. " Mehetabel tried honestly to make her see that this would be nocommon quilt, but her limited vocabulary and her emotion stood between herand expression. At last Sophia said, with a kindly impatience: "Oh, there!Don't bother me. I never could keep track of your quiltin' patterns, anyhow. I don't care what pattern you go by. "

With this overwhelmingly, although unconsciously, generous permissionMehetabel rushed back up the steep attic stairs to her room, and in ajoyful agitation began preparations for the work of her life. It was evenbetter than she hoped. By some heaven-sent inspiration she had invented apattern beyond which no patchwork quilt could go. 

She had but little time from her incessant round of household drudgery forthis new and absorbing occupation, and she did not dare sit up late atnight lest she burn too much candle. It was weeks before the little squarebegan to take on a finished look, to show the pattern. Then Mehetabel wasin a fever of impatience to bring it to completion. She was tooconscientious to shirk even the smallest part of her share of the work ofthe house, but she rushed through it with a speed which left her pantingas she climbed to the little room. This seemed like a radiant spot to heras she bent over the innumerable scraps of cloth which already in herimagination ranged themselves in the infinitely diverse pattern of hermasterpiece. Finally she could wait no longer, and one evening ventured tobring her work down beside the fire where the family sat, hoping that somegood fortune would give her a place near the tallow candles on themantelpiece. She was on the last corner of the square, and her needle flewin and out with inconceivable rapidity. No one noticed her, a fact whichfilled her with relief, and by bedtime she had but a few more stitches toadd. 

As she stood up with the others, the square fluttered out of her tremblingold hands and fell on the table. Sophia glanced at it carelessly. "Is thatthe new quilt you're beginning on?" she asked with a yawn. "It looks likea real pretty pattern. Let's see it. " Up to that moment Mehetabel hadlabored in the purest spirit of disinterested devotion to an ideal, but asSophia held her work toward the candle to examine it, and exclaimed inamazement and admiration, she felt an astonished joy to know that hercreation would stand the test of publicity. 

"Land sakes!" ejaculated her sister-in-law, looking at the many-coloredsquare. "Why, Mehetabel Elwell, where'd you git that pattern?"

"I made it up, " said Mehetabel quietly, but with unutterable pride. 

"No!" exclaimed Sophia incredulously. "_Did_ you! Why, I never see such apattern in my life. Girls, come here and see what your Aunt Mehetabel isdoing. "

The three tall daughters turned back reluctantly from the stairs. "I don'tseem to take much interest in patchwork, " said one listlessly. 

"No, nor I neither!" answered Sophia; "but a stone image would take aninterest in this pattern. Honest, Mehetabel, did you think of it yourself?And how under the sun and stars did you ever git your courage up to startin a-making it? Land! Look at all those tiny squinchy little seams! Whythe wrong side ain't a thing _but_ seams!"

The girls echoed their mother's exclamations, and Mr. Elwell himself cameover to see what they were discussing. "Well, I declare!" he said, lookingat his sister with eyes more approving than she could ever remember. "Thatbeats old Mis' Wightman's quilt that got the blue ribbon so many times atthe county fair. "

Mehetabel's heart swelled within her, and tears of joy moistened her oldeyes as she lay that night in her narrow, hard bed, too proud and excitedto sleep. The next day her sister-in-law amazed her by taking the huge panof potatoes out of her lap and setting one of the younger children topeeling them. "Don't you want to go on with that quiltin' pattern?" shesaid; "I'd kind o' like to see how you're goin' to make the grape-vinedesign come out on the corner. "

By the end of the summer the family interest had risen so high thatMehetabel was given a little stand in the sitting-room where she couldkeep her pieces, and work in odd minutes. She almost wept over suchkindness, and resolved firmly not to take advantage of it by neglectingher work, which she performed with a fierce thoroughness. But the wholeatmosphere of her world was changed. Things had a meaning now. Through thelongest task of washing milk-pans there rose the rainbow of promise of hervariegated work. She took her place by the little table and put thethimble on her knotted, hard finger with the solemnity of a priestessperforming a sacred rite. 

She was even able to bear with some degree of dignity the extreme honor ofhaving the minister and the minister's wife comment admiringly on hergreat project. The family felt quite proud of Aunt Mehetabel as MinisterBowman had said it was work as fine as any he had ever seen, "and hedidn't know but finer!" The remark was repeated verbatim to the neighborsin the following weeks when they dropped in and examined in a perversesilence some astonishingly difficult _tour de force_ which Mehetabel hadjust finished. 

The family especially plumed themselves on the slow progress of the quilt. "Mehetabel has been to work on that corner for six weeks, come Tuesday, and she ain't half done yet, " they explained to visitors. They fell out ofthe way of always expecting her to be the one to run on errands, even forthe children. "Don't bother your Aunt Mehetabel, " Sophia would call. "Can't you see she's got to a ticklish place on the quilt?"

The old woman sat up straighter and looked the world in the face. She wasa part of it at last. She joined in the conversation and her remarks werelistened to. The children were even told to mind her when she asked themto do some service for her, although this she did but seldom, the habit ofself-effacement being too strong. 

One day some strangers from the next town drove up and asked if they couldinspect the wonderful quilt which they had heard of, even down in their endof the valley. After that such visitations were not uncommon, making theElwells' house a notable object. Mehetabel's quilt came to be one of thetown sights, and no one was allowed to leave the town without having paidtribute to its worth. The Elwells saw to it that their aunt was betterdressed than she had ever been before, and one of the girls made her apretty little cap to wear on her thin white hair. 

A year went by and a quarter of the quilt was finished, a second yearpassed and half was done. The third year Mehetabel had pneumonia and layill for weeks and weeks, overcome with terror lest she die before her workwas completed. A fourth year and one could really see the grandeur of thewhole design; and in September of the fifth year, the entire familywatching her with eager and admiring eyes, Mehetabel quilted the laststitches in her creation. The girls held it up by the four corners, andthey all looked at it in a solemn silence. Then Mr. Elwell smote one hornyhand within the other and exclaimed: "By ginger! That's goin' to thecounty fair!"

Mehetabel blushed a deep red at this. It was a thought which had occurredto her in a bold moment, but she had not dared to entertain it. The familyacclaimed the idea, and one of the boys was forthwith dispatched to thehouse of the neighbor who was chairman of the committee for their village. He returned with radiant face, "Of course he'll take it. Like's not it maygit a prize, so he says; but he's got to have it right off, because allthe things are goin' to-morrow morning. "

Even in her swelling pride Mehetabel felt a pang of separation as thebulky package was carried out of the house. As the days went on she feltabsolutely lost without her work. For years it had been her onepreoccupation, and she could not bear even to look at the little stand, now quite bare of the litter of scraps which had lain on it so long. Oneof the neighbors, who took the long journey to the fair, reported that thequilt was hung in a place of honor in a glass case in "Agricultural Hall. "But that meant little to Mehetabel's utter ignorance of all that layoutside of her brother's home. The family noticed the old woman'sdepression, and one day Sophia said kindly, "You feel sort o' lost withoutthe quilt, don't you, Mehetabel?"

"They took it away so quick!" she said wistfully; "I hadn't hardly had onereal good look at it myself. "

Mr. Elwell made no comment, but a day or two later he asked his sister howearly she could get up in the morning. 

"I dun'no'. Why?" she asked. 

"Well, Thomas Ralston has got to drive clear to West Oldton to see alawyer there, and that is four miles beyond the fair. He says if you cangit up so's to leave here at four in the morning he'll drive you over tothe fair, leave you there for the day, and bring you back again at night. "

Mehetabel looked at him with incredulity. It was as though someone hadoffered her a ride in a golden chariot up to the gates of heaven. "Why, you can't _mean_ it!" she cried, paling with the intensity of her emotion. Her brother laughed a little uneasily. Even to his careless indifferencethis joy was a revelation of the narrowness of her life in his home. "Oh, 'tain't so much to go to the fair. Yes, I mean it. Go git your thingsready, for he wants to start to-morrow morning. "

All that night a trembling, excited old woman lay and stared at therafters. She, who had never been more than six miles from home in herlife, was going to drive thirty miles away--it was like going to anotherworld. She who had never seen anything more exciting than church supperwas to see the county fair. To Mehetabel it was like making the tour ofthe world. She had never dreamed of doing it. She could not at all imaginewhat would be like. 

Nor did the exhortations of the family, as they bade good-by to her, throwany light on her confusion. They had all been at least once to the sceneof gayety she was to visit, and as she tried to eat her breakfast theycalled out conflicting advice to her till her head whirled. Sophie toldher to be sure and see the display of preserves. Her brother said not tomiss inspecting the stock, her niece said the fancywork was the only thingworth looking at and her nephews said she must bring them home an accountof the races. The buggy drove up to the door, she was helped in, and herwraps tucked about her. They all stood together and waved good-by to heras she drove out of the yard. She waved back, but she scarcely saw them. On her return home that evening she was very pale, and so tired and stiffthat her brother had to lift her out bodily, but her lips were set in ablissful smile. They crowded around her with thronging questions, untilSophia pushed them all aside, telling them Aunt Mehetabel was too tired tospeak until she had had her supper. This was eaten in an enforced silenceon the part of the children, and then the old woman was helped into aneasy-chair before the fire. They gathered about her, eager for news of thegreat world, and Sophia said, "Now, come, Mehetabel, tell us all aboutit!"

Mehetabel drew a long breath. "It was just perfect!" she said; "finer eventhan I thought. They've got it hanging up in the very middle of a sort o'closet made of glass, and one of the lower corners is ripped and turnedback so's to show the seams on the wrong side. "

"What?" asked Sophia, a little blankly. 

"Why, the quilt!" said Mehetabel in surprise. "There are a whole lot ofother ones in that room, but not one that can hold a candle to it, if I dosay it who shouldn't. I heard lots of people say the same thing. You oughtto have heard what the women said about that corner, Sophia. Theysaid--well, I'd be ashamed to _tell_ you what they said. I declare if Iwouldn't!"

Mr. Elwell asked, "What did you think of that big ox we've heard so muchabout?"

"I didn't look at the stock, " returned his sister indifferently. "That setof pieces you gave me, Maria, from your red waist, come out just lovely!"she assured one of her nieces. "I heard one woman say you could 'mostsmell the red silk roses. "

"Did any of the horses in our town race?" asked young Thomas. 

"I didn't see the races. "

"How about the preserves?" asked Sophia. 

"I didn't see the preserves, " said Mehetabel calmly. 

"You see, I went right to the room where the quilt was and then I didn'twant to leave it. It had been so long since I'd seen it. I had to look atit first real good myself and then I looked at the others to see if therewas any that could come up to it. And then the people begin comin' in andI got so interested in hearin' what they had to say I couldn't think ofgoin' anywheres else. I ate my lunch right there too, and I'm as glad ascan be I did, too; for what do you think?"--she gazed about her withkindling eyes--"while I stood there with a sandwich in one hand didn'tthe head of the hull concern come in and open the glass door and pin'First Prize' right in the middle of the quilt!"

There was a stir of congratulation and proud exclamation. Then Sophiareturned again to the attack, "Didn't you go to see anything else?" shequeried. 

"Why, no, " said Mehetabel. "Only the quilt. Why should I?"

She fell into a reverie where she saw again the glorious creation of herhand and brain hanging before all the world with the mark of highestapproval on it. She longed to make her listeners see the splendid visionwith her. She struggled for words; she reached blindly after unknownsuperlatives. "I tell you it looked like----" she said, and paused, hesitating. Vague recollections of hymn-book phraseology came into hermind, the only form of literary expression she knew; but they weredismissed as being sacrilegious, and also not sufficiently forcible. Finally, "I tell you it looked real _well!_" she assured them, and satstaring into the fire, on her tired old face the supreme content of anartist who has realized his ideal. 

PORTRAIT OF A PHILOSOPHER

I

The news of Professor Gridley's death filled Middletown College withconsternation. Its one claim to distinction was gone, for in spite of theexcessive quiet of his private life, he had always cast about the obscurelittle college the shimmering aura of greatness. There had been nofondness possible for the austere old thinker, but Middletown village, aswell as the college, had been touched by his fidelity to the very moderateattractions of his birthplace. When, as often happened, some famous figurewas seen on the streets, people used to say first, "Here to see old Grid, I suppose, " and then, "Funny how he sticks here. They say he was offeredseven thousand at the University of California. " In the absence of anyknown motive for this steadfastness, the village legend-making instincthad evolved a theory that he did not wish to move away from a State ofwhich his father had been Governor, and where the name of Gridley was likea patent of nobility. 

And now he was gone, the last of the race. His disappearance caused theusual amount of reminiscent talk among his neighbors. The older peoplerecalled the bygone scandals connected with his notorious and popularfather and intimated with knowing nods that there were plenty of otherdescendants of the old Governor who were not entitled legally to bear thename; but the younger ones, who had known only the severely ascetic lifeand cold personality of the celebrated scholar, found it difficult toconnect him with such a father. In their talk they brought to mind the manhimself, his quiet shabby clothes, his big stooping frame, his sad blackeyes absent almost to vacancy as though always fixed on high and distantthoughts; and those who had lived near him told laughing stories about thecrude and countrified simplicity of his old aunt's housekeeping--it wassaid that the president of Harvard had been invited to join them once in aSunday evening meal of crackers and milk--but the general tenor of feelingwas, as it had been during his life, of pride in his great fame and in thecelebrated people who had come to see him. 

This pride warmed into something like affection when the day after hisdeath, came the tidings that he had bequeathed to his college the GinoSprague Fallères portrait of himself. Of course, at that time, no one inMiddletown had seen the picture, for the philosopher's sudden death hadoccurred, very dramatically, actually during the last sitting. He had, infact, had barely one glimpse of it himself, as, according to Fallères'sinvariable rule no one, not even the subject of the portrait, had beenallowed to examine an unfinished piece of work. But though Middletown hadno first-hand knowledge of the picture, there could be no doubt about thevalue of the canvas. As soon as it was put on exhibition in London, fromevery art-critic in the three nations who claimed Fallères for their ownthere rose a wail that this masterpiece was to be buried in an unknowncollege in an obscure village in barbarous America. It was confidentlystated that it would be saved from such an unfitting resting-place bystrong action on the part of an International Committee of Artists; butMiddletown, though startled by its own good fortune, clung with Yankeetenacity to its rights. Raphael Collin, of Paris, commenting on this inthe _Revue des Deux Mondes_, cried out whimsically upon the woes of anart-critic's life, "as if there were not already enough wearisomepilgrimages necessary to remote and uncomfortable places with jaw-breakingnames, which must nevertheless be visited for the sake of a singlepicture!" And a burlesque resolution to carry off the picture by force wasadopted at the dinner in London given in honor of Fallères the eveningbefore he set off for America to attend the dedicatory exercises withwhich Middletown planned to install its new treasure. 

For the little rustic college rose to its one great occasion. Bold intheir confidence in their dead colleague's name, the college authoritiessent out invitations to all the great ones of the country. Those to whomGridley was no more than a name on volumes one never read came becausethe portrait was by Fallères, and those who had no interest in the worldof art came to honor the moralist whose noble clear-thinking hadsimplified the intimate problems of modern life. There was the usualresiduum of those who came because the others did, and, also as usual, they were among the most brilliant figures in the procession which filedalong, one October morning, under the old maples of Middletown campus. 

It was a notable celebration. A bishop opened the exercises with prayer, aUnited States senator delivered the eulogy of the dead philosopher, theveil uncovering the portrait was drawn away by the mayor of one ofAmerica's largest cities, himself an ardent Gridleyite, and among thosewho spoke afterward were the presidents of three great universities. Theprofessor's family was represented but scantily. He had had one brother, who had disappeared many years ago under a black cloud of ill report, andone sister who had married and gone West to live. Her two sons, middle-aged merchants from Ohio, gave the only personal note to theoccasion by their somewhat tongue-tied and embarrassed presence, forGridley's aunt was too aged and infirm to walk with the procession fromthe Gymnasium, where it formed, to the Library building, where theportrait was installed. 

After the inevitable photographers had made their records of the memorablegathering, the procession began to wind its many-colored way back to theAssembly Hall, where it was to lunch. Everyone was feeling relieved thatthe unveiling had gone off so smoothly, and cheerful at the prospect offood. The undergraduates began lustily to shout their college song, whichwas caught up by the holiday mood of the older ones. This cheerfultumult gradually died away in the distance, leaving the room of theportrait deserted in an echoing silence. A janitor began to remove therows of folding chairs. The celebration was over. 

Into the empty room there now limped forward a small, shabby old womanwith a crutch. "I'm his aunt, that lived with him, " she explainedapologetically, "and I want to see the picture. "

She advanced, peering nearsightedly at the canvas. The janitor continuedstacking up chairs until he was stopped by a cry from the newcomer. Shewas a great deal paler than when she came in. She was staring hard at theportrait and now beckoned him wildly to do the same. "Look at it! Look atit!"

Surprised, he followed the direction of her shaking hand. "Sure, it'sProfessor Grid to the life!" he said admiringly. 

"Look at it! Look at it!" She seemed not to be able to find any otherwords. 

After a prolonged scrutiny he turned to her with a puzzled line betweenhis eyebrows. "Since you've spoken of it, ma'am, I will say that there's asomething about the expression of the eyes . . . And mouth, maybe . . . Thatain't just the professor. He was more absent-like. It reminds me ofsomebody else . . . Of some face I've seen . . . "

She hung on his answer, her mild, timid old face drawn like a mask oftragedy. "Who? Who?" she prompted him. 

For a time he could not remember, staring at the new portrait andscratching his head. Then it came to him suddenly: "Why, sure, I ought toha' known without thinkin', seeing the other picture as often as everytime I've swep' out the president's office. And Professor Grid alwayslooked like him some, anyhow. "

The old woman leaned against the wall, her crutch trembling in her hand. Her eyes questioned him mutely. 

"Why, ma'am, who but his own father, to be sure . . . The old Governor. "

II

While they had been duly sensible of the luster reflected upon them by thecelebration in honor of their distinguished uncle, Professor Gridley's twonephews could scarcely have said truthfully that they enjoyed theoccasion. As one of them did say to the other, the whole show was ratherout of their line. Their line was wholesale hardware and, being eager toreturn to it, it was with a distinct feeling of relief that they waitedfor the train at the station. They were therefore as much displeased assurprised by the sudden appearance to them of their great-aunt, veryhaggard, her usual extreme timidity swept away by overmastering emotion. She clutched at the two merchants with a great sob of relief: "Stephen!Eli! Come back to the house, " she cried, and before they could stop herwas hobbling away. They hurried after her, divided between the fear oflosing their train and the hope that some inheritance from their uncle hadbeen found. They were not mercenary men, but they felt a not unnaturaldisappointment that Professor Gridley had left not a penny, not even tohis aunt, his one intimate. 

They overtook her, scuttling along like some frightened and wounded littleanimal. "What's the matter, Aunt Amelia?" they asked shortly. "We've gotto catch this train. "

She faced them. "You can't go now. You've got to make them take thatpicture away. "

"Away!" Their blankness was stupefaction. 

She raged at them, the timid, harmless little thing, like a creaturedistraught. "Didn't you see it? Didn't you _see_ it?"

Stephen answered: "Well, no, not to have a good square look at it. The manin front of me kept getting in the way. "

Eli admitted: "If you mean you don't see anything in it to make all thishurrah about, I'm with you. It don't look half finished. I don't like thatslap-dash style. "

She was in a frenzy at their denseness. "Who did it look like?" shechallenged them. 

"Why, like Uncle Grid, of course. Who else?"

"Yes, yes, " she cried; "who else? Who else?"

They looked at each other, afraid that she was crazed, and spoke moregently: "Why, I don't know, I'm sure, who else. Like Grandfather Gridley, of course; but then Uncle Grid always did look like his father. "

At this she quite definitely put it out of their power to leave her byfainting away. 

They carried her home and laid her on her own bed, where one of themstayed to attend her while the other went back to rescue their desertedbaggage. As the door closed behind him the old woman came to herself. "Oh, Stephen, " she moaned, "I wish it had killed me, the way it did youruncle. "

"What _is_ the matter?" asked her great-nephew wonderingly. "What do youthink killed him?"

"That awful, awful picture! I know it now as plain as if I'd been there. He hadn't seen it all the time he was sitting for it, though he'd alreadyput in his will that he wanted the college to have it, and when he did seeit--" she turned on the merchant with a sudden fury: "How _dare_ you saythose are your uncle's eyes!"

He put his hand soothingly on hers. "Now, now, Aunt 'Melia, maybe theexpression isn't just right, but the color is _fine_. . . Just thatjet-black his were . . . And the artist has got in exact that funny stiffway uncle's hair stood up over his forehead. "

The old woman fixed outraged eyes upon him. "Color!" she said. "And hair!Oh, Lord, help me!"

She sat up on the bed, clutching her nephew's hand, and began to talkrapidly. When, a half-hour later, the other brother returned, neither ofthem heard him enter the house. It was only when he called at the foot ofthe stairs that they both started and Stephen ran down to join him. 

"You'll see the president . . . You'll fix it?" the old woman cried afterhim. 

"I'll see, Aunt 'Melia, " he answered pacifyingly, as he drew his brotherout of doors. He looked quite pale and moved, and drew a long breathbefore he could begin. 

"Aunt Amelia's been telling me a lot of things I never knew, Eli. It seemsthat . . . Say, did you ever hear that Grandfather Gridley, the Governor, was such a bad lot?"

"Why, mother never said much about her father one way or the other, but Ialways sort of guessed he wasn't all he might have been from her neverbringing us on to visit here until after he died. She used to look queer, too, when folks congratulated her on having such a famous man for father. All the big politicians of his day thought a lot of him. He _was_ as smartas chain-lightning!"

"He was a disreputable old scalawag!" cried his other grandson. "Some ofthe things Aunt Amelia has been telling me make me never want to come backto this part of the country again. Do you know why Uncle Grid lived sopoor and scrimped and yet left no money? He'd been taking care of a wholefamily grandfather had beside ours; and paying back some peoplegrandfather did out of a lot of money on a timber deal fifty years ago;and making it up to a little village in the backwoods that grandfatherpersuaded to bond itself for a railroad that he knew wouldn't go near it. "

The two men stared at each other an instant, reviewing in a new light thelife that had just closed. "That's why he never married, " said Elifinally. 

"No, that's what I said, but Aunt Amelia just went wild when I did. Shesaid . . . Gee!" he passed his hand over his eyes with a gesture of mentalconfusion. "Ain't it strange what can go on under your eyes and you neverknow it? Why, she says Uncle Grid was just like his father. "

The words were not out of his mouth before the other's face of horror madehim aware of his mistake. "No! No! Not that! Heavens, no! I mean . . . Madelike him . . . _wanted_ to be that kind, 'specially drink . . . " His tongue, unused to phrasing abstractions, stumbled and tripped in his haste tocorrect the other's impression. "You know how much Uncle Grid used to looklike grandfather . . . The same black hair and broad face and thick red lipsand a kind of knob on the end of his nose? Well, it seems he had hisfather's insides, too . . . _but his mother's conscience!_ I guess, fromwhat Aunt Amelia says, that the combination made life about as near Tophetfor him . . . ! She's the only one to know anything about it, because she'slived with him always, you know, took him when grandmother died and he wasa child. She says when he was younger he was like a man fighting a wildbeast . . . He didn't dare let up or rest. Some days he wouldn't stopworking at his desk all day long, not even to eat, and then he'd grab up apiece of bread and go off for a long tearing tramp that'd last 'most allnight. You know what a tremendous physique all the Gridley men have had. Well, Uncle Grid turned into work all the energy the rest of them spent indeviltry. Aunt Amelia said he'd go on like that day after day for a month, and then he'd bring out one of those essays folks are so crazy about. Shesaid she never could bear to _look_ at his books . . . Seemed to her theywere written in his blood. She told him so once and he said it was theonly thing to do with blood like his. "

He was silent, while his listener made a clucking noise of astonishment. "My! My! I'd have said that there never was anybody more different fromgrandfather than uncle. Why, as he got on in years he didn't even looklike him any more. "

This reference gave Stephen a start. "Oh, yes, that's what all this cameout for. Aunt Amelia is just wild about this portrait. It's just a notionof hers, of course, but after what she told me I could see, easy, how theidea would come to her. It looks this way, she says, as though Uncle Gridinherited his father's physical make-up complete, and spent all his lifefighting it . . . And won out! And here's this picture making him look theway he would if he'd been the worst old . . . As if he'd been like theGovernor. She says she feels as though she was the only one to defenduncle . . . As if it could make any difference to him! I guess the poor oldlady is a little touched. Likely it's harder for her, losing uncle, thanwe realized. She just about worshiped him. Queer business, anyhow, wasn'tit? Who'd ha' thought he was like that?"

He had talked his unwonted emotion quite out, and now looked at hisbrother with his usual matter-of-fact eye. "Did you tell the station agentto hold the trunk?"

The other, who was the younger, looked a little abashed. "Well, no; Ifound the train was so late I thought maybe we could . . . You know there'sthat business to-morrow . . . !"

His senior relieved him of embarrassment. "That's a good idea. Sure wecan. There's nothing we could do if we stayed. It's just a notion of Aunt'Melia's, anyhow. I agree with her that it don't look so awfully likeUncle Grid, but, then, oil-portraits are never any good. Give me aphotograph!"

"It's out of our line, anyhow, " agreed the younger, looking at his watch. 

III

The president of Middletown College had been as much relieved as pleasedby the success of the rather pretentious celebration he had planned. Hisannoyance was correspondingly keen at the disturbing appearance, in theafternoon reception before the new portrait, of the late professor's aunt, "an entirely insignificant old country woman, " he hastily assured M. Fallères after she had been half forced, half persuaded to retire, "whosecriticisms were as negligible as her personality. "

The tall, Jove-like artist concealed a smile by stroking his great brownbeard. When it came to insignificant country people, he told himself, itwas hard to draw lines in his present company. He was wondering whether hemight not escape by an earlier train. 

To the president's remark he answered that no portrait-painter escapedunreasonable relatives of his sitters. "It is an axiom with our guild, " hewent on, not, perhaps, averse to giving his provincial hosts a newsensation, "that the family is never satisfied, and also that the familyhas no rights. A sitter is a subject only, like a slice of fish. The onlyquestion is how it's done. What difference does it make a century fromnow, if the likeness is good? It's a work of art or it's nothing. " Heannounced this principle with a regal absence of explanation and turnedaway; but his thesis was taken up by another guest, a New York art-critic. 

"By Jove, it's inconceivable, the ignorance of art in America!" he toldthe little group before the portrait. "You find everyone so incurablypersonal in his point of view . . . Always objecting to a masterpiecebecause the watch-chain isn't the kind usually worn by the dear departed. "

Someone else chimed in. "Yes, it's incredible that anyone, even an oldvillage granny, should be able to look at that canvas and not be struckspeechless by its quality. "

The critic was in Middletown to report on the portrait and he now beganmarshaling his adjectives for that purpose. "I never saw such use ofpigment in my life . . . It makes the Whistler 'Carlyle' look like burnt-outashes . . . The luminous richness of the blacks in the academic gown, themasterly generalization in the treatment of the hair, the placing of thosegreat talons of hands on the canvas carrying out the vigorous lines of thecomposition, and the unforgettable felicity of those brutally red lips asthe one ringing note of color. As for life-likeness, what's the old dametalking about! I never saw such eyes! Not a hint of meretricious emphasison their luster and yet they fairly flame. "

The conversation spread to a less technical discussion as the group wasjoined by the professor of rhetoric, an ambitious young man with aninsatiable craving for sophistication, who felt himself for once entirelyin his element in the crowd of celebrities. "It's incredibly good luckthat our little two-for-a-cent college should have so fine a thing, " hesaid knowingly. "I've been wondering how such an old skinflint as Gridleyever got the money loose to have his portrait done by--"

A laugh went around the group at the idea. "It was Mackintosh, the sugarking, who put up for it. He's a great Gridleyite, and persuaded him tosit. "

"_Persuade_ a man to sit to Fallères!" The rhetoric professor was outragedat the idea. 

"Yes, so they say. The professor was dead against it from the first. Fallères himself had to beg him to sit. Fallères said he felt a realinspiration at the sight of the old fellow . . . Knew he could make a goodthing out of him. He _was_ a good subject!"

The little group turned and stared appraisingly at the portrait hanging soclose to them that it seemed another living being in their midst. Therhetoric professor was asked what kind of a man the philosopher had beenpersonally, and answered briskly: "Oh, nobody knew him personally . . . Thesilent old codger. He was a dry-as-dust, bloodless, secular monk--"

He was interrupted by a laugh from the art-critic, whose eyes were stillon the portrait. 

"Excuse me for my cynical mirth, " he said, "but I must say he doesn't lookit. I was prepared for any characterization but that. He looks like apowerful son of the Renaissance, who might have lived in that one littlevacation of the soul after medievalism stopped hag-riding us, and beforethe modern conscience got its claws on us. And you say he was a blue-nosedPuritan!"

The professor of rhetoric looked an uneasy fear that he was beingridiculed. "I only repeated the village notion of him, " he said airily. "He may have been anything. All I know is that he was as secretive as aclam, and about as interesting personally. "

"Look at the picture, " said the critic, still laughing; "you'll know allabout him!"

The professor of rhetoric nodded. "You're right, he doesn't look much likemy character of him. I never seem to have had a good, square look at himbefore. I've heard several people say the same thing, that they seemed tounderstand him better from the portrait than from his living face. Therewas something about his eyes that kept you from thinking of anything butwhat he was saying. "

The critic agreed. "The eyes are wonderful . . . Ruthless in theirpower . . . Fires of hell. " He laughed a deprecating apology for hisoveremphatic metaphor and suggested: "It's possible that there was more tothe professorial life than met the eye. Had he a wife?"

"No; it was always a joke in the village that he would never look at awoman. "

The critic glanced up at the smoldering eyes of the portrait and smiled. "I've heard of that kind of a man before, " he said. "Never known to drink, either, I suppose?"

"Cold-water teetotaler, " laughed the professor, catching the spirit of theoccasion. 

"Look at the color in that nose!" said the critic. "I fancy that theascetic moralist--"

A very young man, an undergraduate who had been introduced as the juniorusher, nodded his head. "Yep, a lot of us fellows always thought old Grida little too good to be true. "

An older man with the flexible mouth of a politician now ventured acontribution to a conversation no longer bafflingly esthetic: "His father, old Governor Gridley, wasn't he . . . Well, I guess you're right about theson. No halos were handed down in _that_ family!"

The laugh which followed this speech was stopped by the approach ofFallères, his commanding presence dwarfing the president beside him. Hewas listening with a good-natured contempt to the apparently ratheranxious murmurs of the latter. 

"Of course I know, Mr. Fallères, it is a great deal to ask, but she is soinsistent . . . She won't go away and continues to make the most distressingspectacle of herself . . . And several people, since she has said so muchabout it, are saying that the expression is not that of the lateprofessor. Much against my will I promised to speak to you--"

His mortified uneasiness was so great that the artist gave him a rescuinghand. "Well, Mr. President, what can I do in the matter? The man is dead. I cannot paint him over again, and if I could I would only do again as Idid this time, choose that aspect which my judgment told me would make thebest portrait. If his habitual vacant expression was not so interesting asanother not so permanent a habit of his face . . . Why, the poor artist mustbe allowed some choice. I did not know I was to please his grandmother, and not posterity. "

"His aunt, " corrected the president automatically. 

The portrait-painter accepted the correction with his tolerant smile. "Hisaunt, " he repeated. "The difference is considerable. May I ask what it wasyou promised her?"

The president summoned his courage. It was easy to gather from hisinfinitely reluctant insistence how painful and compelling had been thescene which forced him to action. "She wants you to change it . . . To makethe expression of the--"

For the first time the artist's equanimity was shaken. He took a stepbackward. "Change it!" he said, and although his voice was low the casualchat all over the room stopped short as though a pistol had been fired. 

"It's not _my_ idea!" The president confounded himself inself-exoneration. "I merely promised, to pacify her, to ask you if youcould not do some little thing that would--"

The critic assumed the role of conciliator. "My dear sir, I don't believeyou quite understand what you are asking. It's as though you asked apriest to make just a little change in the church service and leave outthe 'not' in the Commandments. "

"I only wish to know Mr. Fallères's attitude, " said the president stiffly, a little nettled by the other's note of condescension. "I presume he willbe willing to take the responsibility of it himself and explain to theprofessor's aunt that _I_ have done--"

The artist had recovered from his lapse from Olympian to calm and nownodded, smiling: "Dear me, yes, Mr. President, I'm used to iraterelatives. "

The president hastened away and the knots of talkers in other parts of theroom, who had been looking with expectant curiosity at the group beforethe portrait, resumed their loud-toned chatter. When their attention wasnext drawn in the same direction, it was by a shaky old treble, breaking, quavering with weakness. A small, shabby old woman, leaning on a crutch, stood looking up imploringly at the tall painter. 

"My dear madam, " he broke in on her with a kindly impatience, "all thatyou say about Professor Gridley is much to his credit, but what has it todo with me?"

"You painted his portrait, " she said with a simplicity that was likestupidity. "And I am his aunt. You made a picture of a bad man. I know hewas a good man. "

"I painted what I saw, " sighed the artist wearily. He looked furtively athis watch. 

The old woman seemed dazed by the extremity of her emotion. She lookedabout her silently, keeping her eyes averted from the portrait that stoodso vividly like a living man beside her. "I don't know what to do!" shemurmured with a little moan. "I can't _bear_ it to have it stayhere--people forget so. Everybody'll think that Gridley looked like_that_! And there isn't anybody but me. He never had anybody but me. "

The critic tried to clear the air by a roundly declaratory statement ofprinciples. "You'll pardon my bluntness, madam; but you must remember thatnone but the members of Professor Gridley's family are concerned in theexact details of his appearance. Fifty years from now nobody will rememberhow he looked, one way or the other. The world is only concerned withportraits as works of art. "

She followed his reasoning with a strained and docile attention and nowspoke eagerly as though struck by an unexpected hope: "If that's all, whyput his name to it? Just hang it up, and call it anything. "

She shrank together timidly and her eyes reddened at the laughter whichgreeted this naïve suggestion. 

Fallères looked annoyed and called hisdefender off. "Oh, never mind explaining me, " he said, snapping his watchshut. "You'll never get the rights of it through anybody's head who hasn'thimself sweat blood over a composition only to be told that the other sideof the sitter's profile is usually considered the prettier. After all, wehave the last word, since the sitter dies and the portrait lives. "

The old woman started and looked at him attentively. 

"Yes, " said the critic, laughing, "immortality's not a bad balm forpin-pricks. "

The old woman turned very pale and for the first time looked again at theportrait. An electric thrill seemed to pass through her as her eyesencountered the bold, evil ones fixed on her. She stood erect with a rigidface, and "Immortality!" she said, under her breath. 

Fallères moved away to make his adieux to the president, and the littlegroup of his satellites straggled after him to the other end of the room. For a moment there no one near the old woman to see the crutch furiouslyupraised, hammer-like, or to stop her sudden passionate rush upon thepicture. 

At the sound of cracking cloth, they turned back, horrified. They saw her, with an insane violence, thrust her hands into the gaping hole that hadbeen the portrait's face and, tearing the canvas from end to end, fallupon the shreds with teeth and talon. 

All but Fallères flung themselves toward her, dragging her away. With amovement as instinctive he rushed for the picture, and it was to him, ashe stood aghast before the ruined canvas, that the old woman's shrilltreble was directed, above the loud shocked voices of those about her:"There ain't anything immortal but souls!" she cried. 

FLINT AND FIRE

My husband's cousin had come up from the city, slightly more fagged andsardonic than usual, and as he stretched himself out in the bigporch-chair he was even more caustic than was his wont about the barenessand emotional sterility of the lives of our country people. 

"Perhaps they had, a couple of centuries ago, when the Puritanhallucination was still strong, a certain fierce savor of religiousintolerance; but now that that has died out, and no material prosperityhas come to let them share in the larger life of their century, there is aflatness, a mean absence of warmth or color, a deadness to all emotionsbut the pettiest sorts--"

I pushed the pitcher nearer him, clinking the ice invitingly, and directedhis attention to our iris-bed as a more cheerful object of contemplationthan the degeneracy of the inhabitants of Vermont. The flowers burned ontheir tall stalks like yellow tongues of flame. The strong, sword-likegreen leaves thrust themselves boldly up into the spring air like achallenge. The plants vibrated with vigorous life. 

In the field beyond them, as vigorous as they, strode Adoniram Purdonbehind his team, the reins tied together behind his muscular neck, hishands grasping the plow with the masterful sureness of the successfulpractitioner of an art. The hot, sweet spring sunshine shone down on'Niram's head with its thick crest of brown hair, the ineffable odor ofnewly turned earth steamed up about him like incense, the mountain streambeyond him leaped and shouted. His powerful body answered every call madeon it with the precision of a splendid machine. But there was no elationin the grimly set face as 'Niram wrenched the plow around a big stone, oras, in a more favorable furrow, the gleaming share sped steadily alongbefore the plowman, turning over a long, unbroken brown ribbon of earth. 

My cousin-in-law waved a nervous hand toward the sternly silent figure asit stepped doggedly behind the straining team, the head bent forward, theeyes fixed on the horses' heels. 

"There!" he said. "There is an example of what I mean. Is there anotherrace on earth which could produce a man in such a situation who would noton such a day sing, or whistle, or at least hold up his head and look atall the earthly glories about him?"

I was silent, but not for lack of material for speech. 'Niram's reasonsfor austere self-control were not such as I cared to discuss with a man ofmy cousin's mental attitude. As we sat looking at him the noon whistlefrom the village blew and the wise old horses stopped in the middle of afurrow. 'Niram unharnessed them, led them to the shade of a tree, and puton their nose-bags. Then he turned and came toward the house. 

"Don't I seem to remember, " murmured my cousin under his breath, "that, even though he is a New-Eng-lander, he has been known to make up errandsto your kitchen to see your pretty Ev'leen Ann?"

I looked at him hard; but he was only gazing down, rather cross-eyed, onhis grizzled mustache, with an obvious petulant interest in the increaseof white hairs in it. Evidently his had been but a chance shot. 'Niramstepped up on the grass at the edge of the porch. He was so tall that heovertopped the railing easily, and, reaching a long arm over to where Isat, he handed me a small package done up in yellowish tissue-paper. Without hat-raisings, or good-mornings, or any other of the greetingsusual in a more effusive civilization, he explained briefly:

"My stepmother wanted I should give you this. She said to thank you forthe grape-juice. " As he spoke he looked at me gravely out of deep-set blueeyes, and when he had delivered his message he held his peace. 

I expressed myself with the babbling volubility of one whose manners havebeen corrupted by occasional sojourns in the city. "Oh, 'Niram!" I criedprotestingly, as I opened the package and took out an exquisitelywrought old-fashioned collar. "Oh, 'Niram! How _could_ your stepmothergive such a thing away? Why, it must be one of her precious old relics. Idon't _want_ her to give me something every time I do some little thingfor her. Can't a neighbor send her in a few bottles of grape-juice withouther thinking she must pay it back somehow? It's not kind of her. She hasnever yet let me do the least thing for her without repaying me withsomething that is worth ever so much more than my trifling services. "

When I had finished my prattling, 'Niram repeated, with an accent offinality, "She wanted I should give it to you. "

The older man stirred in his chair. Without looking at him I knew that hisgaze on the young rustic was quizzical and that he was recording on thetablets of his merciless memory the ungraceful abruptness of the other'saction and manner. 

"How is your stepmother feeling to-day, 'Niram?" I asked. 

"Worse. "

'Niram came to a full stop with the word. My cousin covered his satiricalmouth with his hand. 

"Can't the doctor do anything to relieve her?" I asked. 

'Niram moved at last from his Indian-like immobility. He looked up underthe brim of his felt hat at the skyline of the mountain, shimmeringiridescent above us. "He says maybe 'lectricity would help her some. I'mgoin' to git her the batteries and things soon's I git the rubber bandagespaid for. "

There was a long silence. My cousin stood up, yawning, and sauntered awaytoward the door. "Shall I send Ev'leen Ann out to get the pitcher andglasses?" he asked in an accent which he evidently thought very humorouslysignificant. 

The strong face under the felt hat turned white, the jaw muscles set hard, but for all this show of strength there was an instant when the man's eyeslooked out with the sick, helpless revelation of pain they might have hadwhen 'Niram was a little boy of ten, a third of his present age, and lessthan half his present stature. Occasionally it is horrifying to see how achance shot rings the bell. 

"No, no! Never mind!" I said hastily. "I'll take the tray in when I go. "

Without salutation or farewell 'Niram Purdon turned and went back to hiswork. 

The porch was an enchanted place, walled around with starlit darkness, visited by wisps of breezes shaking down from their wings the breath oflilac and syringa, flowering wild grapes, and plowed fields. Down at thefoot of our sloping lawn the little river, still swollen by the meltedsnow from the mountains, plunged between its stony banks and shouted itsbrave song to the stars. 

We three middle-aged people--Paul, his cousin, and I--had disposed ouruncomely, useful, middle-aged bodies in the big wicker chairs and leftthem there while our young souls wandered abroad in the sweet, dark gloryof the night. At least Paul and I were doing this, as we sat, hand inhand, thinking of a May night twenty years before. One never knows whatHorace is thinking of, but apparently he was not in his usual captiousvein, for after a long pause he remarked, "It is a night almostindecorously inviting to the making of love. "

My answer seemed grotesquely out of key with this, but its sequence wasclear in my mind. I got up, saying: "Oh, that reminds me--I must go andsee Ev'leen Ann. I'd forgotten to plan to-morrow's dinner. "

"Oh, everlastingly Ev'leen Ann!" mocked Horace from his corner. "Can't youthink of anything but Ev'leen Ann and her affairs?"

I felt my way through the darkness of the house, toward the kitchen, bothdoors of which were tightly closed. When I stepped into the hot, closeroom, smelling of food and fire, I saw Ev'leen Ann sitting on the straightkitchen chair, the yellow light of the bracket-lamp beating down on herheavy braids and bringing out the exquisitely subtle modeling of hersmooth young face. Her hands were folded in her lap. She was staring atthe blank wall, and the expression of her eyes so startle and shocked methat I stopped short and would have retreated if it had not been too late. She had seen me, roused herself, and said quietly, as though continuingconversation interrupted the moment before:

"I had been thinking that there was enough left of the roast to makehash-balls for dinner"--"hash-balls" is Ev'leen Ann's decent Anglo-Saxonname for croquette--"and maybe you'd like a rhubarb pie. "

I knew well enough she had been thinking of no such thing, but I could aseasily have slapped a reigning sovereign on the back as broken in on theregal reserve of Ev'leen Ann in her clean gingham. 

"Well, yes, Ev'leen Ann, " I answered in her own tone of reasonableconsideration of the matter; "that would be nice, and your pie-crust is soflaky that even Mr. Horace will have to be pleased. "

"Mr. Horace" is our title for the sardonic cousin whose carping ways arehalf a joke, and half a menace in our family. 

Ev'leen Ann could not manage the smile which should have greeted thissally. She looked down soberly at the white-pine top of the kitchen tableand said, "I guess there is enough sparrow-grass up in the garden for amess, too, if you'd like that. "

"That would taste very good, " I agreed, my heart aching for her. 

"And creamed potatoes, " she finished bravely, thrusting my unspoken pityfrom her. 

"You know I like creamed potatoes better than any other kind, " Iconcurred. 

There was a silence. It seemed inhuman to go and leave the stricken youngthing to fight her trouble alone in the ugly prison, her work-place, though I thought I could guess why Ev'leen Ann had shut the doors sotightly. I hung near her, searching my head for something to say, but shehelped me by no casual remark. Niram is not the only one of our people whopossesses so the full the supreme gift of silence. Finally I mentioned thereport of a case of measles in the village, and Ev'leen Ann responded inkind with the news that her Aunt Emma had bought a potato-planter. Ev'leenAnn is an orphan, brought up by a well-to-do spinster aunt, who isstrong-minded and runs her own farm. After a time we glided by way ofsimilar transitions to the mention of his name. 

"'Niram Purdon tells me his stepmother is no better, " I said. "Isn't ittoo bad?" I thought it well for Ev'leen Ann to be dragged out of her blackcave of silence once in a while, even if it could be done only by force. As she made no answer, I went on. "Everybody who knows Niram thinks itsplendid of him to do so much for his stepmother. "

Ev'leen Ann responded with a detached air, as though speaking of a matterin China: "Well, it ain't any more than what he should. She was awful goodto him when he was little and his father got so sick. I guess 'Niramwouldn't ha' had much to eat if she hadn't ha' gone out sewing to earn itfor him and Mr. Purdon. " She added firmly, after a moment's pause, "No, ma'am, I don't guess it's any more than what 'Niram had ought to do. "

"But it's very hard on a young man to feel that he's not able to marry, " Icontinued. Once in a great while we came so near the matter as this. Ev'leen Ann made no answer. Her face took on a pinched look of sickness. She set her lips as though she would never speak again. But I knew that acriticism of 'Niram would always rouse her, and said: "And really, I think'Niram makes a great mistake to act as he does. A wife would be a help tohim. She could take care of Mrs. Purdon and keep the house. "

Ev'leen Ann rose to the bait, speaking quickly with some heat: "I guess'Niram knows what's right for him to do! He can't afford to marry when hecan't even keep up with the doctor's bills and all. He keeps the househimself, nights and mornings, and Mrs. Purdon is awful handy about takingcare of herself, for all she's bedridden. That's her way, you know. Shecan't bear to have folks do for her. She'd die before she'd let anybody doanything for her that she could anyways do for herself!"

I sighed acquiescingly. Mrs. Purdon's fierce independence was a rock onwhich every attempt at sympathy or help shattered itself to atoms. Thereseemed to be no other emotion left in her poor old work-worn shell of abody. As I looked at Ev'leen Ann it seemed rather a hatefulcharacteristic, and I remarked, "It seems to me it's asking a good deal of'Niram to spoil his life in order that his stepmother can go on pretendingshe's independent. "

Ev'leen Ann explained hastily: "Oh, 'Niram doesn't tell her anythingabout--She doesn't know he would like to--he don't want she should beworried--and, anyhow, as 'tis, he can't earn enough to keep ahead of allthe: doctors cost. "

"But the right kind of a wife--a good, competent girl--could help out byearning something, too. "

Ev'leen Ann looked at me forlornly, with no surprise. The idea wasevidently not new to her. "Yes, ma'am, he could. But 'Niram says he ain'tthe kind of man to let his wife go out working. " Even while she droopedunder the killing verdict of his pride she was loyal to his standardsand uttered no complaint. She went on, 'Niram wants Aunt Em'line to havethings the way she wants 'em, as near as he can give 'em to her--and it'sright she should. "

"Aunt Emeline?" I repeated, surprised at her absence of mind. "You meanMrs. Purdon, don't you?"

Ev'leen Ann looked vexed at her slip, but she scorned to attempt anyconcealment. She explained dryly, with the shy, stiff embarrassment ourcountry people have in speaking of private affairs: "Well, she _is_ myAunt Em'line, Mrs. Purdon is, though I don't hardly ever call her that. You see, Aunt Emma brought me up, and she and Aunt Em'line don't haveanything to do with each other. They were twins, and when they were girlsthey got edgeways over 'Niram's father, when 'Niram was a baby and hisfather was a young widower and come courting. Then Aunt Em'line marriedhim, and Aunt Emma never spoke to her afterward. "

Occasionally, in walking unsuspectingly along one of our leafy lanes, somesuch fiery geyser of ancient heat uprears itself in a boiling column. Inever get used to it, and started back now. 

"Why, I never heard of that before, and I've known your Aunt Emma and Mrs. Purdon for years!"

"Well, they're pretty old now, " said Ev'leen Ann listlessly, with thenatural indifference of self-centered youth to the bygone tragedies of thepreceding generation. 

"It happened quite some time ago. And both of them were so touchy, ifanybody seemed to speak about it, that folks got in the way of letting italone. First Aunt Emma wouldn't speak to her sister because she'd marriedthe man she'd wanted, and then when Aunt Emma made out so well farmin' andgot so well off, why, then Mrs. Purdon wouldn't try to make it up becauseshe was so poor. That was after Mr. Purdon had had his stroke of paralysisand they'd lost their farm and she'd taken to goin' out sewin'--not butwhat she was always perfectly satisfied with her bargain. She always actedas though she'd rather have her husband's old shirt stuffed with strawthan any other man's whole body. He was a real nice man, I guess, Mr. Purdon was. "

There I had it--the curt, unexpanded chronicle of two passionate lives. And there I had also the key to Mrs. Purdon's fury of independence. It wasthe only way in which she could defend her husband against the charge, sodamning in her world, of not having provided for his wife. It was the onlymonument she could rear to her husband's memory. And her husband had beenall there was in life for her!

I stood looking at her young kinswoman's face, noting the granite underthe velvet softness of its youth, and divining the flame underlying thegranite. I longed to break through her wall and to put my arms about her, and on the impulse of the moment I cast aside the pretense of casualnessin our talk. 

"Oh, my dear!" I said. "Are you and 'Niram always to go on like this?Can't anybody help you?"

Ev'leen Ann looked at me, her face suddenly old and gray. "No, ma'am; weain't going to go on this way. We've decided, 'Niram and I have, that itain't no use. We've decided that we'd better not go places together anymore or see each other. It's too--If 'Niram thinks we can't"--she flamedso that I knew she was burning from head to foot--"it's better for usnot--" She ended in a muffled voice, hiding her face in the crook ofher arm. 

Ah, yes; now I knew why Ev'leen Ann had shut out the passionate breath ofthe spring night!

I stood near her, a lump in my throat, but I divined the anguish of hershame at her involuntary self-revelation, and respected it. I dared do nomore than to touch her shoulder gently. 

The door behind us rattled. Ev'leen Ann sprang up and turned her facetoward the wall. Paul's cousin came in, shuffling a little, blinking hiseyes in the light of the unshaded lamp, and looking very cross and tired. He glanced at us without comment as he went over to the sink. "Nobodyoffered me anything good to drink, " he complained, "so I came in to getsome water from the faucet for my nightcap. "

When he had drunk with ostentation from the tin dipper he went to theoutside door and flung it open. 

"Don't you people know how hot and smelly it is in here?" he said, withhis usual unceremonious abruptness. 

The night wind burst in, eddying, and puffed out the lamp with a breath. In an instant the room was filled with coolness and perfumes and therushing sound of the river. Out of the darkness came Ev'leen Ann's youngvoice. "It seems to me, " she said, as though speaking to herself, "that Inever heard the Mill Brook sound loud as it has this spring. "

I woke up that night with the start one has at a sudden call. But therehad been no call. A profound silence spread itself through the sleepinghouse. Outdoors the wind had died down. Only the loud brawl of the riverbroke the stillness under the stars. But all through the silence and thisvibrant song there rang a soundless menace which brought me out of bed andto my feet before I was awake. I heard Paul say, "What's the matter?" in asleepy voice, and "Nothing, " I answered, reaching for my dressing-gown andslippers. I listened for a moment, my head ringing with all thefrightening tales of the morbid vein of violence which runs through thecharacter of our reticent people. There was still no sound. I went alongthe hall and up the stairs to Ev'leen Ann room, and I opened the doorwithout knocking. The room was empty. 

Then how I ran! Calling loudly for Paul to join me, I ran down the twoflights of stairs, out of the open door and along the hedged path whichleads down to the little river. The starlight was clear. I could seeeverything as plainly as though in early dawn. I saw the river, andsaw--Ev'leen Ann!

There was a dreadful moment of horror, which I shall never remember veryclearly, and then Ev'leen Ann and I--both very wet--stood on the bank, shuddering in each other's arms. 

Into our hysteria there dropped, like a pungent caustic the arid voice ofHorace, remarking, "Well, are you two people crazy, or are you walking inyour sleep?" I could feel Ev'leen Ann stiffen in my arms, and I nearlystepped back from her in astonished admiration as I heard her snatch atthe straw thus offered, and still shuddering horribly from head to foot, force herself to say quite connectedly: "Why--yes--of course--I've alwaysheard about my grandfather Parkman's walking in his sleep. Folks _said_'twould come out in the family some time. "

Paul was close behind Horace--I wondered a little at his not beingfirst--and with many astonished and inane ejaculations, such as peoplealways make on startling occasions, we made our way back into the house tohot blankets and toddies. But I slept no more that night. Some time afterdawn, however, I did fall into a troubled unconsciousness full of baddreams, and only awoke when the sun was quite high. I opened my eyesto see Ev'leen Ann about to close the door. "Oh, did I wake you up?" shesaid. "I didn't mean to. That little Harris boy is here with a letter foryou. "

She spoke with a slightly defiant tone of self-possession. I tried to playup to her interpretation of her role. "The little Harris boy?" I said, sitting up in bed. "What in the world is he bringing me a letter for?"Ev'leen Ann, with her usual clear perception of the superfluous inconversation, vouchsafed no opinion on a matter where she had noinformation, but went downstairs and brought back the note. It was of fourlines, and--surprisingly enough--from old Mrs. Purdon, who asked meabruptly if I would have my husband take me to see her. She specified, andunderlined the specification, that I was to come "right off, and in theautomobile. " Wondering extremely at this mysterious bidding I sought outPaul, who obediently cranked up our small car and carried me off. Therewas no sign of Horace about the house, but some distance on the other sideof the village we saw his tall, stooping figure swinging along the road. He carried a cane and was characteristically occupied in violentlyswitching off the heads from the wayside weeds as he walked. He refusedour offer to take him in, alleging that he was out for exercise and toreduce his flesh--an ancient jibe at his bony frame which made him for aninstant show a leathery smile. 

There was, of course, no one at Mrs. Purdon's to let us into the tiny, three-roomed house, since the bedridden invalid spent her days there alonewhile 'Niram worked his team on other people's fields. Not knowing what wemight find, Paul stayed outside in the car, while I stepped inside inanswer to Mrs. Purdon's "Come _in_, why don't you!" which sounded quite asdry as usual. But when I saw her I knew that things were not as usual. 

She lay flat on her back, the little emaciated wisp of humanity, hardlyraising the piecework quilt enough to make the bed seem occupied, and toaccount for the thin, worn old face on the pillow. But as I entered theroom her eyes seized on mine, and I was aware of nothing but them and somefury of determination behind them. With a fierce heat of impatience at myfirst natural but quickly repressed exclamation of surprise she explainedbriefly that she wanted Paul to lift her into the automobile and take herinto the next township to the Hulett farm. "I'm so shrunk away to nothin', I know I can lay on the back seat if I crook myself up, " she said, with acool accent but a rather shaky voice. Seeming to realize that even herintense desire to strike the matter-of-fact note could not take the placeof any and all explanation of her extraordinary request, she added, holding my eyes steady with her own: "Emma Hulett's my twin sister. Iguess it ain't so queer, my wanting to see her. "

I thought, of course, wewere to be used as the medium for some strange, sudden familyreconciliation, and went out to ask Paul if he thought he could carry theold invalid to the car. He replied that, so far as that went, he couldcarry so thin an old body ten times around the town, but that he refusedabsolutely to take such a risk without authorization from her doctor. Iremembered the burning eyes of resolution I had left inside, and sent himto present his objections to Mrs. Purdon herself. 

In a few moments I sawhim emerge from the house with the old woman in his arms. He had evidentlytaken her up just as she lay. The piecework quilt hung down in long folds, flashing its brilliant reds and greens in the sunshine, which shone sostrangely upon the pallid old countenance, facing the open sky for thefirst time in years. 

We drove in silence through the green and gold lyric of the spring day, an elderly company sadly out of key with the triumphant note of eternalyouth which rang through all the visible world. Mrs. Purdon looked atnothing, said nothing, seemed to be aware of nothing but the purpose inher heart, whatever that might be. Paul and I, taking a leaf from ourneighbors' book, held, with a courage like theirs, to their excellenthabit of saying nothing when there is nothing to say. We arrived at thefine old Hulett place without the exchange of a single word. 

"Now carry me in, " said Mrs. Purdon briefly, evidently hoarding herstrength. 

"Wouldn't I better go and see if Miss Hulett is at home?" I asked. 

Mrs. Purdon shook her head impatiently and turned her compelling eyes onmy husband, I went up the path before them to knock at the door, wonderingwhat the people in the house would possibly be thinking of us There was noanswer to my knock. "Open the door and go in, " commanded Mrs. Purdon fromout her quilt. 

There was no one in the spacious, white-paneled hall and no sound in allthe big, many-roomed house. 

"Emma's out feeding the hens, " conjectured Mrs. Purdon, not, I fancied, without a faint hint of relief in her voice. "Now carry me up-stairs tothe first room on the right. "

Half hidden by his burden, Paul rolled wildly inquiring eyes at me; but heobediently staggered up the broad old staircase, and, waiting till I hadopened the first door to the right, stepped into the big bedroom. 

"Put me down on the bed, and open them shutters, " Mrs. Purdon commanded. 

She still marshaled her forces with no lack of decision, but with afainting voice which made me run over to her quickly as Paul laid her downon the four-poster. Her eyes were still indomitable, but her mouth hungopen slackly and her color was startling. "Oh, Paul, quick! quick! Haven'tyou your flask with you?"

Mrs. Purdon informed me in a barely audible whisper, "In the cornercupboard at the head of the stairs, " and I flew down the hallway. Ireturned with a bottle, evidently of great age. There was only a littlebrandy in the bottom, but it whipped up a faint color into the sickwoman's lips. 

As I was bending over her and Paul was thrusting open the shutters, letting in a flood of sunshine and flecky leaf-shadows, a firm, rapid stepcame down the hall, and a vigorous woman, with a tanned face and a clean, faded gingham dress, stopped short in the doorway with an expression ofstupefaction. 

Mrs. Purdon put me on one side, and although she was physically incapableof moving her body by a hair's breadth, she gave the effect of havingrisen to meet the newcomer. "Well, Emma, here I am, " she said in a queervoice, with involuntary quavers in it. As she went on she had it moreunder control, although in the course of her extraordinarily succinctspeech it broke and failed her occasionally. When it did, she drew in herbreath with an audible, painful effort, struggling forward steadily inwhat she had to say. "You see, Emma, it's this way: My 'Niram and yourEv'leen Ann have been keeping company--ever since they went to schooltogether--you know that's well as I do, for all we let on we didn't, onlyI didn't know till just now how hard they took it. They can't get marriedbecause 'Niram can't keep even, let alone get ahead any, because I cost somuch bein' sick, and the doctor says I may live for years this way, same'sAunt Hettie did. An' 'Niram is thirty-one, an' Ev'leen Ann istwenty-eight, an' they've had 'bout's much waitin' as is good for folksthat set such store by each other. I've thought of every way out ofit--and there ain't any. The Lord knows I don't enjoy livin' any, not so'sto notice the enjoyment, and I'd thought of cutting my throat like UncleLish, but that'd make 'Niram and Ev'leen Ann feel so--to think why I'ddone it; they'd never take the comfort they'd ought in bein' married; sothat won't do. There's only one thing to do. I guess you'll have to takecare of me till the Lord calls me. Maybe I won't last so long as thedoctor thinks. "

When she finished, I felt my ears ringing in the silence. She had walkedto the sacrificial altar with so steady a step, and laid upon it herprecious all with so gallant a front of quiet resolution, that for aninstant I failed to take in the sublimity of her self-immolation. Mrs. Purdon asking for charity! And asking the one woman who had most reason torefuse it to her. 

Paul looked at me miserably, the craven desire to escape a scene writtenall over him. "Wouldn't we better be going, Mrs. Purdon?" I said uneasily. I had not ventured to look at the woman in the doorway. 

Mrs. Purdon motioned me to remain, with an imperious gesture whosefierceness showed the tumult underlying her brave front. "No; I want youshould stay. I want you should hear what I say, so's you can tell folks, if you have to. Now, look here, Emma, " she went on to the other, stillobstinately silent; "you must look at it the way 'tis. We're neither of usany good to anybody, the way we are--and I'm dreadfully in the way of theonly two folks we care a pin about--either of us. You've got plenty to dowith, and nothing to spend it on. I can't get myself out of their way bydying without going against what's Scripture and proper, but--" Her steelycalm broke. She burst out in a screaming, hysterical voice: "You've just_got_ to, Emma Hulett! You've just _got_ to! If you don't, I won't nevergo back to 'Niram's house! I'll lie in the ditch by the roadside till thepoor-master comes to git me--and I'll tell everybody that it's because myown twin sister, with a house and a farm and money in the bank, turned meout to starve--" A fearful spasm cut her short. She lay twisted and limp, the whites of her eyes showing between the lids. 

"Good God, she's gone!" cried Paul, running to the bed. 

I was aware that the woman in the doorway had relaxed her frozenimmobility and was between Paul and me as we rubbed the thin, icy handsand forced brandy between the flaccid lips. We all three thought her deador dying, and labored over her with the frightened thankfulness for oneanother's living presence which always marks that dreadful moment. Buteven as we fanned and rubbed, and cried out to one another to open thewindows and to bring water, the blue lips moved to a ghostly whisper: "Em, listen--" The old woman went back to the nickname of their common youth. "Em--your Ev'leen Ann--tried to drown herself--in the Mill Brook lastnight . . . That's what decided me--to--" And then we were plunged intoanother desperate struggle with Death for the possession of the batteredold habitation of the dauntless soul before us. 

"Isn't there any hot water in the house?" cried Paul, and "Yes, yes; atea-kettle on the stove!" answered the woman who labored with us. Paul, divining that she meant the kitchen, fled down-stairs. I stole a look atEmma Hulett's face as she bent over the sister she had not seen in thirtyyears, and I knew that Mrs. Purdon's battle was won. It even seemed thatshe had won another skirmish in her never-ending war with death, for alittle warmth began to come back into her hands. 

When Paul returned with the tea-kettle, and a hot-water bottle had beenfilled, the owner of the house straightened herself, assumed her rightfulposition as mistress of the situation, and began to issue commands. "Yougit right in the automobile, and go git the doctor, " she told Paul. "That'll be the quickest. She's better now, and your wife and I can keepher goin' till the doctor gits here. "

As Paul left the room she snatched something white from a bureau-drawer, stripped the worn, patched old cotton nightgown from the skeleton-likebody, and, handling the invalid with a strong, sure touch, slipped on asoft, woolly outing-flannel wrapper with a curious trimming of zigzagbraid down the front. Mrs. Purdon opened her eyes very slightly, but shutthem again at her sister's quick command, "You lay still, Em'line, anddrink some of this brandy. " She obeyed without comment, but after a pauseshe opened her eyes again and looked down at the new garment which cladher. She had that moment turned back from the door of death, but her firstbreath was used to set the scene for a return to a decent decorum. 

"You're still a great hand for rick-rack work, Em, I see, " she murmured ina faint whisper. "Do you remember how surprised Aunt Su was when you madeup a pattern?"

"Well, I hadn't thought of it for quite some time, " returned Miss Hulett, in exactly the same tone of everyday remark. As she spoke she slipped herarm under the other's head and poked the pillow up to a more comfortableshape. "Now you lay perfectly still, " she commanded in the hectoring toneof the born nurse; "I'm goin' to run down and make you up a good hot cupof sassafras tea. "

I followed her down into the kitchen and was met by the same refusal tobe melodramatic which I had encountered in Ev'leen Ann. I was most anxiousto know what version of my extraordinary morning I was to give out to theworld, but hung silent, positively abashed by the cool casualness of theother woman as she mixed her brew. Finally, "Shall I tell 'Niram--Whatshall I say to Ev'leen Ann? If anybody asks me--" I brought out withclumsy hesitation. 

At the realization that her reserve and family pride were wholly at themercy of any report I might choose to give, even my iron hostess faltered. She stopped short in the middle of the floor, looked at me silently, piteously, and found no word. 

I hastened to assure her that I would attempt no hateful picturesquenessof narration. "Suppose I just say that you were rather lonely here, nowthat Ev'leen Ann has left you, and that you thought it would be nice tohave your sister come to stay with you, so that 'Niram and Ev'leen Ann canbe married?"

Emma Hulett breathed again. She walked toward the stairs with the steamingcup in her hand. Over her shoulder she remarked, "Well, yes, ma'am; thatwould be as good a way to put it as any, I guess. "

'Niram and Ev'leen Ann were standing up to be married. They looked verystiff and self-conscious, and Ev'leen Ann was very pale. 'Niram's bighands, bent in the crook of a man who handles tools, hung down by his newblack trousers. Ev'leen Ann's strong fingers stood out stiffly from oneanother. They looked hard at the minister and repeated after him in lowand meaningless tones the solemn and touching words of the marriageservice. Back of them stood the wedding company, in freshly washed andironed white dresses, new straw hats, and black suits smelling of camphor. In the background, among the other elders, stood Paul and Horace and I--myhusband and I hand in hand; Horace twiddling the black ribbon which holdshis watch, and looking bored. Through the open windows into the stuffinessof the best room came an echo of the deep organ note of midsummer. 

"Whom God hath joined together--" said the minister, and the epitome ofhumanity which filled the room held its breath--the old with a wonder upontheir life-scarred faces, the young half frightened to feel the stir ofthe great wings soaring so near them. 

Then it was all over. 'Niram and Ev'leen Ann were married, and the rest ofus were bustling about to serve the hot biscuit and coffee and chickensalad, and to dish up the ice-cream. Afterward there were no citifiedrefinements of cramming rice down the necks of the departing pair or tyingplacards to the carriage in which they went away. Some of the men went outto the barn and hitched up for 'Niram, and we all went down to the gate tosee them drive off. They might have been going for one of their Sundayafternoon "buggy-rides" except for the wet eyes of the foolish women andgirls who stood waving their hands in answer to the flutter of Ev'leenAnn's handkerchief as the carriage went down the hill. 

We had nothing to say to one another after they left, and began soberly todisperse to our respective vehicles. But as I was getting into our car anew thought suddenly struck me. 

"Why, " I cried, "I never thought of it before! However in the world didold Mrs. Purdon know about Ev'leen Ann--that night?"

Horace was pulling at the door, which was badly adjusted and shut hard. Heclosed it with a vicious slam. "_I_ told her, " he said crossly. 

A SAINT'S HOURS

 In the still cold before the sun HER LAUDS Her brothers and her sisters small She woke, and washed and dressed each one. 

 And through the morning hours all, PRIME Singing above her broom, she stood And swept the house from hall to hall. 

 At noon she ran with tidings good TERCE Across the field and down the lane To share them with the neighborhood. 

 Four miles she walked and home again, SEXT To sit through half the afternoon And hear a feeble crone complain;

 But when she saw the frosty moon NONES And lakes of shadow on the hill Her maiden dreams grew bright as noon. 

 She threw her pitying apron frill VESPERS Over a little trembling mouse When the sleek cat yawned on the sill, In the late hours and drowsy house. COMPLINE At last, too tired, beside her bed She fell asleep . . . Her prayers half said. 

IN MEMORY OF L. H. W. 

He began life characteristically, depreciated and disparaged. When he wasa white, thin, big-headed baby, his mother, stripping the suds from herlean arms, used to inveigh to her neighbors against his existence. "Wa'n'tit just like that _do_-less Lem Warren, not even to leave me foot-freewhen he died, but a baby coming!"

"_Do_-less, " in the language of our valley, means a combination ofshiftless and impractical, particularly to be scorned. 

Later, as he began to have some resemblance to the appearance he was towear throughout life, her resentment at her marriage, which she consideredthe one mistake of her life, kept pace with his growth. "Look at him!" shecried to anyone who would listen. "Ain't that Warren, all over? Did any of_my_ folks ever look so like a born fool? Shut your mouth, for the Lord'ssake, Lem, and maybe you won't scare folks quite so much. "

Lem had a foolish, apologetic grin with which he always used to respond tothese personalities, hanging his head to one side and opening and shuttinghis big hands nervously. 

The tumble-down, two-roomed house in which the Warrens lived was acrossthe road from the schoolhouse, and Mrs. Warren's voice was penetrating. Lem was accepted throughout his school-life at the home estimate. Theugly, overgrown boy, clad in cast-off, misfit clothing was allowed to playwith the other children only on condition that he perform all the hard, uninteresting parts of any game. Inside the schoolroom it was the same. 

He never learned to shut his mouth, and his speech was always halting andindistinct, so that he not only did not recite well in class, but wasnever in one of the school entertainments. He chopped the wood and broughtit in, swept the floor and made the fires, and then listened in grinning, silent admiration while the others, arrayed in their best, spoke piecesand sang songs. 

He was not "smart at his books" and indeed did not learn even to read veryfluently. This may have been partly because the only books he ever sawwere old school books, the use of which was given him free on account ofhis mother's poverty. He was not allowed, of course to take them from theschoolroom. But if he was not good at book-learning he was not withoutaccomplishments. He early grew large for his age, and strong from muchchopping of wood and drawing of water for his mother's washings, and hewas the best swimmer of all those who bathed in the cold, swift mountainstream which rushes near the schoolhouse. The chief consequence of thisexpertness was that in the summer he was forced to teach each succeedinggeneration of little boys to swim and dive. They tyrannized over himunmercifully--as, in fact, everyone did. 

Nothing made his mother more furious than such an exhibition of what shecalled "Lem's meachin'ness. " "Ain't you got no stand-up _in_ ye?" she waswont to exhort him angrily. "If you don't look out for yourself in thisworld, you needn't think anybody else is gunto!"

The instructions in ethics he received at her hands were the only ones heever knew, for, up to his fourteenth year, he never had clothesrespectable enough to wear to church, and after that he had other thingsto think of. Fourteen years is what we call in our State "over schoolage. " It was a date to which Mrs. Warren had looked forward witheagerness. After that, the long, unprofitable months of enforced schoolingwould be over, Lem would be earning steady wages, and she could sit backand "live decent. "

It seemed to her more than she could bear, that, almost upon her son'sbirthday, she was stricken down with paralysis. It was the first calamityfor which she could not hold her marriage responsible, and her bitternessthereupon extended itself to fate in general. She cannot have been acheerful house-mate during the next ten years, when Lem was growingsilently to manhood. 

He was in demand as "help" on the farms about him, on account of his greatstrength and faithfulness, although the farmers found him exasperatinglyslow and, when it was a question of animals, not always sure to obeyorders. He could be trusted to be kind to horses, unlike most hired men weget nowadays, but he never learned "how to get the work out of theirhide. " It was his way, on a steep hill with a heavy load, to lay down thewhip, get out, and put his own powerful shoulder to the wheel. If thisfailed, he unloaded part of the logs and made two trips of it. Theuncertainty of his progress can be imagined. The busy and impatient farmerand sawyer at the opposite ends of his route were driven to exhaust theirentire vocabulary of objurgation on him. He was, they used to inform himin conclusion, "the most _do_-less critter the Lord ever made!"

He was better with cows and sheep--"feller-feelin, " his mother saidscornfully, watching him feed a sick ewe--and he had here, even incomparison with his fellow-men, a fair degree of success. It was indeedthe foundation of what material prosperity he ever enjoyed. A farmer, short of cash, paid him one year with three or four ewes and a ram. Heworked for another farmer to pay for the rent of a pasture and had, thatfirst year, as everybody admitted, almighty good luck with them. Therewere several twin lambs born that spring and everyone lived. Lem used tomake frequent night visits during lambing-time to the pasture to make surethat all was well. 

I remember as a little girl starting back from some village festivity lateone spring night and seeing a lantern twinkle far up on the mountainside. "Lem Warren out fussin' with his sheep, " some one of my elders remarked. Later, as we were almost home, we saw the lantern on the road ahead of usand stopped the horses, country-fashion, for an interchange of salutation. Looking out from under the shawl in which I was wrapped, I saw his tallfigure stooping over something held under his coat. The lantern lightedhis weather-beaten face and the expression of his eyes as he looked downat the little white head against his breast. 

 "You're foolish, Lem, " saidmy uncle. "The ewe won't own it if you take it away so long the firstnight. "

"I--I--know, " stuttered Lem, bringing out the words with his usualdifficulty; "but it's mortal cold up on the mounting for little fellers!I'll bring him up as a cosset. "

The incident reminded me vaguely of something I had read about, and it hasremained in my memory. 

After we drove on I remember that there were laughing speculations aboutwhat language old Ma'am Warren would use at having another cosset broughtto the house. Not that it could make any more work for her, since Lem didall that was done about the housekeeping. Chained to her chair by herparalyzed legs, as she was, she could accomplish nothing more than to sitand cavil at the management of the universe all day, until Lem came home, gave her her supper, and put her to bed. 

Badly run as she thought the world, for a time it was more favorable toher material prosperity than she had ever known it. Lem's flock of sheepgrew and thrived. For years nobody in our valley has tried to do much withsheep because of dogs, and all Lem's neighbors told him that some finemorning he would find his flock torn and dismembered. They even pointedout the particular big collie dog who would most likely go "sheep-mad. "Lena's heavy face drew into anxious, grotesque wrinkles at this kind oftalk, and he visited the uplying pasture more and more frequently. 

One morning, just before dawn, he came, pale and shamefaced, to the houseof the owner of the collie. The family, roused from bed by his knocking, made out from his speech, more incoherent than usual, that he was beggingtheir pardon for having killed their dog. "I saw wh-where he'd bit th-thethroats out of two ewes that w-was due to lamb in a few days and I guessI--I--I must ha' gone kind o' crazy. They was ones I liked special. I'dbrought 'em up myself. They--they was all over blood, you know. "

They peered at him in the gray light, half-afraid of the tall apparition. "How _could_ you kill a great big dog like Jack?" They asked wonderingly. 

In answer he held out his great hands and his huge corded arms, red withblood up to the elbow. "I heard him worrying another sheep and I--Ijust--killed him. "

One of the children now cried out: "But I shut Jackie up in the woodshedlast night!"

Someone ran to open the door and the collie bounded out. Lem turned whitein thankfulness, "I'm _mortal_ glad, " he stammered. "I felt awfulbad--afterward. I knew your young ones thought a sight of Jack. "

"But what dog did you kill?" they asked. 

Some of the men went back up on the mountain with him and found, torn inpieces and scattered wide in bloody fragments, as if destroyed by somegreat revenging beast of prey, the body of a big gray wolf. Once in awhile one wanders over the line from the Canada forests and comes downinto our woods, following the deer. 

The hard-headed farmers who looked on that savage scene drew back from theshambling man beside them in the only impulse of respect they ever feltfor him. It was the one act of his life to secure the admiration of hisfellow-men; it was an action of which he himself always spoke in horrorand shame. 

Certainly his marriage aroused no admiration. It was universally regardedas a most addle-pated, imbecile affair from beginning to end. One of thegirls who worked at the hotel in the village "got into trouble, " as ourvernacular runs, and as she came originally from our district and had goneto school there, everyone knew her and was talking about the scandal. OldMa'am Warren was of the opinion, spiritedly expressed, that "Lottie was afool not to make that drummer marry her. She could have, if she'd gone theright way to work. " But the drummer remained persistently absent. 

One evening Lem, starting for his sheep-pasture for his last look for thenight, heard someone crying down by the river and then, as he paused tolisten, heard it no more. He jumped from the bridge without stopping toset down his lantern, knowing well the swiftness of the water, and caughtthe poor cowardly thing as she came, struggling and gasping, down with thecurrent. He took her home and gave her dry clothes of his mother's. Thenleaving the scared and repentant child by his hearth, he set out on footfor the minister's house and dragged him back over the rough countryroads. 

When Ma'am Warren awoke the next morning, Lem did not instantly answer herimperious call, as he had done for so many years. Instead, a red-eyed girlin one of Mrs. Warren's own nightgowns came to the door and saidshrinkingly: "Lem slept in the barn last night. He give his bed to me; buthe'll be in soon. I see him fussin' around with the cow. "

Ma'am Warren stared, transfixed with a premonition of irremediable evil. "What you doin' here?" she demanded, her voice devoid of expressionthrough stupefaction. 

The girl held down her head. "Lem and I were married last night, " shesaid. 

Then Mrs. Warren found her voice. 

When Lem came in it was to a scene of the furious wrangling which washenceforth to fill his house. 

". . . To saddle himself with such trash as you!" his mother was sayingragingly. 

His wife answered in kind, her vanity stung beyond endurance. "Well, youcan be sure he'd never have got him a wife any other way! Nobody but agirl hard put to it would take up with a drivel-headed fool like LemWarren!"

And then the bridegroom appeared at the door and both women turned theirattention to him. 

When the baby was born, Lottie was very sick. Lem took care of his mother, his wife, and the new baby for weeks and weeks. It was at lambing-time, and his flock suffered from lack of attention, although as much as hedared he left his sick women and tended his ewes. He ran in debt, too, tothe grocery-stores, for he could work very little and earned almostnothing. Of course the neighbors helped out, but it was no cheerfulmorning's work to care for the vitriolic old woman, and Lottie was toosick for anyone but Lem to handle. We did pass the baby around from houseto house during the worst of his siege, to keep her off Lem's hands; butwhen Lottie began to get better it was haying-time; everybody was morethan busy, and the baby was sent back. 

Lottie lingered in semi-invalidism for about a year and then died, Lemholding her hand in his. She tried to say something to him that lastnight, so the neighbors who were there reported, but her breath failed herand she could only lie staring at him from eyes that seemed already tolook from the other side of the grave. 

He was heavily in debt when he was thus left with a year-old child not hisown, but he gave Lottie a decent funeral and put up over her grave a stonestating that she was "Charlotte, loved wife of Lemuel Warren, " and thatshe died in the eighteenth year of her life. He used to take the littlegirl and put flowers on the grave, I remember. 

Then he went to work again. His sandy hair was already streaked with gray, though he was but thirty. The doctor said the reason for this phenomenonwas the great strain of his year of nursing; and indeed throughout thatperiod of his life no one knew when he slept, if ever. He was always upand dressed when anyone else was, and late at night we could look acrossand see his light still burning and know that he was rubbing Lottie's backor feeding little Susie. 

All that was changed now, of course. Susie was a strong, healthy childwho slept all through the night in her little crib by her stepfather'scorded bed, and in the daytime went everywhere he did. Wherever he "workedout" he used to give her her nap wrapped in a horse blanket on the hay inthe barn; and he carried her in a sling of his own contrivance up to hissheep-pasture. Old Ma'am Warren disliked the pretty, laughing child sobitterly that he was loath to leave her at home; but when he was therewith her, for the first time he asserted himself against his mother, bidding her, when she began to berate the child's parentage, to "bestill!" with so strange and unexpected an accent of authority that she wasquite frightened. 

Susie was very fond of her stepfather at first, but when she came ofschool age, mixed more with the other children, and heard laughing, contemptuous remarks about him, the frank and devouring egotism ofchildhood made her ashamed of her affection, ashamed of him with hisuncouth gait, his mouth always sagging open, his stammering, ignorantspeech, which the other children amused themselves by mocking. Though hewas prospering again with his sheep, owned the pasture and his house now, and had even built on another room as well as repairing the older part, hespent little on his own adornment. It all went for pretty clothes forSusie, for better food, for books and pictures, for tickets for Susie togo to the circus and the county fair. Susie knew this and loved him bystealth for it, but the intolerably sensitive vanity of her twelve yearsmade her wretched to be seen in public with him. 

Divining this, he ceased going with her to school-picnics andSunday-school parties, where he had been a most useful pack-animal, and, dressing her in her best with his big calloused hands, watched her fromthe window join a group of the other children. His mother predictedsavagely that his "spoilin' on that bad-blooded young one would bring herto no good end, " and when, at fifteen, Susie began to grow very pretty andsaucy and willful and to have beaux come to see her, the old woman exultedopenly over Lem's helpless anxiety. 

He was quite gray now, although not yet forty-five, and so stooped that hepassed for an old man. He owned a little farm, his flock of sheep was thelargest in the township, and Susie was expected to make a good marriage inspite of her antecedents. 

And then Frank Gridley's oldest son, Ed, came back from business collegewith store clothes and city hats and polished tan shoes, and began idlingabout, calling on the girls. From the first, he and Susie ran togetherlike two drops of water. Bronson Perkins, a cousin of mine, a big, silent, ruminative lad who had long hung about Susie, stood no show at all. Onenight in county-fair week, Susie, who had gone to the fair with a crowd ofgirl friends, was not at home at ten o'clock. Lem, sitting in his doorwayand watching the clock, heard the approach of the laughing, singingstraw-ride in which she had gone, with a long breath of relief; but thebig hay-wagon did not stop at his gate. 

He called after it in a harsh voice and was told that "Ed Gridley and shewent off to the hotel to get supper. He said he'd bring her home later. "

Lem went out to the barn, hitched up the faster of his two heavyplow-horses and drove from his house to Woodville, eight miles andup-hill, in forty-five minutes. When he went into the hotel, the clerktold him that the two he sought had had supper served in a private room. Lem ascertained which room and broke the door in with one heave of hisshoulders. Susie sprang up from the disordered supper-table and ran to himlike a frightened child, clinging to him desperately and crying out thatEd scared her so!

"It's all right now, Susie, " he said gently, not looking at the man. "Poppa's come to take you home. "

The man felt his dignity wounded. He began to protest boisterously and todeclare that he was ready to marry the girl--"_now_, this instant, if youchoose!"

Lem put one arm about Susie. "I didn't come to make you marry her. I cometo keep you from doin' it, " he said, speaking clearly for once in hislife. "Susie shan't marry a hound that'd do this. " And as the otheradvanced threateningly on him, he struck him a great blow across the mouththat sent him unconscious to the ground. 

Then Lem went out, paid for the broken lock, and drove home with Susiebehind the foundered plow-horse. 

The next spring her engagement to Bronson Perkins was announced, thougheverybody said they didn't see what use it was for folks to get engagedthat couldn't ever get married. Mr. Perkins, Bronson's father, was daft, not enough to send him to the asylum, but so that he had to be watched allthe time to keep him from doing himself a hurt. He had a horrid way, Iremember, of lighting matches and holding them up to his bared arm untilthe smell of burning flesh went sickeningly through the house and sentsomeone in a rush to him. Of course it was out of the question to bring ayoung bride to such a home. Apparently there were years of waiting beforethem, and Susie was made of no stuff to endure a long engagement. 

As a matter of fact, they were married that fall, as soon as Susie couldget her things ready. Lem took old Mr. Perkins into the room Susie leftvacant. "'Twon't be much more trouble taking care of two old people thanone, " he explained briefly. 

Ma'am Warren's comments on this action have been embalmed forever in thedelighted memories of our people. We have a taste for picturesque andforceful speech. 

From that time we always saw the lunatic and the bentshepherd together. The older man grew quieter under Lem's care than he hadbeen for years, and if he felt one of his insane impulses overtaking him, ran totteringly to grasp his protector's arm until, quaking and shivering, he was himself again. Lem used to take him up to the sheep-pasture for theday sometimes. He liked it up there himself, he said, and maybe 'twould begood for Uncle Hi. He often reported with pride that the old man talked assensible as anybody, "get him off where it's quiet. " Indeed, when Mr. Perkins died, six years later, we had forgotten that he was anything buta little queer, and he had known many happy, lucid hours with hisgrandchildren. 

Susie and Bronson had two boys--sturdy, hearty children, in whom Lem tookthe deepest, shyest pride. He loved to take them off into the woods withhim and exulted in their quick intelligence and strong little bodies. Susie got into the way of letting him take a good deal of the care ofthem. 

It was Lem who first took alarm about the fall that little Frank had, downthe cellar stairs. He hurt his spine somehow--our local doctor could nottell exactly how--and as the injury only made him limp a little, nobodythought much about it, until he began to have difficulty in walking. ThenLem sent for a doctor from Rutland who, as soon as he examined the child, stuck out his lower lip and rubbed his chin ominously. He pronounced thetrouble something with a long name which none of us had ever heard, andsaid that Frank would be a hopeless cripple if it, were not cured soon. There was, he said, a celebrated doctor from Europe now traveling in thiscountry who had a wonderful new treatment for this condition. But underthe circumstances--he looked about the plain farm sitting-room--hesupposed that was out of the question. 

"What did the doctor from foreign parts ask?" queried Bronson, and, beinginformed of some of the customary prices for major operations, fell backhopeless. Susie, her pretty, childish face drawn and blanched into a wanbeauty, put her arms about her sick little son and looked at herstepfather. He had never failed her. 

He did not fail her now. He sold the land he had accumulated field byfield; he sold the great flock of sheep, every one of which he could callby name; he mortgaged the house over the protesting head of his nowbedridden mother; he sold the horse and cow, and the very sticks offurniture from the room where Susie had grown up and where the crazygrandfather of Susie's children had known a peaceful old age and death. Little Frank was taken to New York to the hospital to have the greatsurgeon operate on him--he is there yet, almost completely recovered andnearly ready to come home. 

Back in Hillsboro, Lem now began life all over again, hiring out humbly tohis neighbors and only stipulating that he should have enough free time totake care of his mother. Three weeks ago she had her last stroke ofparalysis and, after lying speechless for a few days, passed away, grim tothe last, by the expression in her fierce old eyes. 

The day after her funeral Lem did not come to work as he was expected. Wewent over to his house and found, to our consternation, that he was notout of bed. 

"Be ye sick, Lem?" asked my uncle. 

He looked at us over the bedclothes with his old foolish, apologeticsmile. "Kind o' lazy, I guess, " he whispered, closing his eyes. 

The doctor was put out by the irregularity of the case. 

"I can't make out anything _really_ the trouble!" he said. "Only thewheels don't go round as fast as they ought. Call it failing heart actionif you want a label. "

The wheels ran more and more slowly until it was apparent to all of usthat before long they would stop altogether. Susie and Bronson were in NewYork with little Frank, so that Lem's care during his last days devolvedon the haphazard services of the neighbors. He was out of his head most ofthe time, though never violent, and all through the long nights lay flaton his back, looking at the ceiling with bright, blank eyes, driving hisox-team, skidding logs, plowing in stony ground and remembering to favorthe off-horse whose wind wasn't good, planting, hoeing, tending his sheep, and teaching obstinate lambs to drink. He used quaint, coaxing names forthese, such as a mother uses for her baby. He was up in themountain-pasture a good deal, we gathered, and at night, from his constantmention of how bright the stars shone. And sometimes, when he was inevident pain, his delusion took the form that Susie, or the little boys, had gone up with him, and got lost in the woods. 

I was on duty the night he died. We thought a change was near, because hehad lain silent all day, and we hoped he would come to himself when heawoke from this stupor. Near midnight he began to talk again, and I couldnot make out at first whether he was still wandering or not. "Hold onhard, Uncle Hi, " I heard him whisper. 

A spoon fell out of my hand and clattered against a plate. He gave a greatstart and tried to sit up. "Yes, mother--coming!" he called hoarsely, andthen looked at me with his own eyes. "I must ha' forgot about mother'sbein' gone, " he apologized sheepishly. 

I took advantage of this lucid interval to try to give him some medicinethe doctor had left. "Take a swallow of this, " I said, holding the glassto his lips. 

"What's it for?" he asked. 

"It's a heart stimulant, " I explained. "The doctorsaid if we could get you through to-night you have agood chance. "

His face drew together in grotesque lines of anxiety. "Little Frankworse?"

"Oh, no, he's doing finely. "

"Susie all right?"

"Why, yes, " I said wonderingly. 

"Nothing the matter with her other boy?"

"Why, no, no, " I told him. "Everybody's all right Here, just take thisdown. "

He turned away his head on the pillow and murmured something I did notcatch. When I asked him what he said, he smiled feebly as in deprecationof his well-known ridiculous ways. "I'm just as much obliged to you, " hesaid, "but if everybody's all right, I guess I won't have any medicine. "He looked at me earnestly. "I'm--I'm real tired, " he said. 

It came out in one great breath--apparently his last, for he did not moveafter that, and his ugly, slack-mouthed face was at once quite still. Itsexpression made me think of the time I had seen it as a child, bylantern-light, as he looked down at the new-born lamb on his breast. 

IN NEW NEW ENGLAND

I. 

This is a true story, for I have heard it ever so many times from mygrandmother. She heard it from her grandmother, who told it about her ownmother; and it began and ended right here in our village of Hillsboro, Vermont, in 1762. 

Probably you think at once of the particular New England old town youknow, and imagine Hillsboro of that date as an elm-shaded, well-keptstreet, with big, white, green-shuttered houses, full of shining mahoganyfurniture and quaint old silver. But my grandmother gives an entirelydifferent picture of old times in this corner of Vermont. Conditions here, at that time, were more as they had been in Connecticut and Massachusettsa hundred and forty years before. Indeed, the Pilgrim Fathers endured nomore hardships as pioneers in a wild, new country than did the firstVermonters. 

Hillsboro had been settled only about fifteen years before this storybegins, and the people had had to make for themselves whatever theypossessed, since there was no way to reach our dark, narrow valley exceptby horseback over the ridge of the Green Mountains. There were no finehouses, because there was no sawmill. There were little, low log cabins oftwo rooms each, and the furniture, such as it was, was rough-hewn out ofnative woods. Our great-grandfathers were too busy clearing the forest andplanting their crops to spend much time designing or polishing table-legs. 

And the number of things they did not have! No stoves, no matches, no books, no lamps, and very few candles; no doctors, no schools, no clocks, and so nearly no money that what they had is not worth mentioning But thefact that there were no schools did not mean that life was one longvacation for the children. 

"No, indeedy!" as grandmother always says emphatically. 

In the urgent bustle of pioneer life, the children could not be sparedfrom work for long school-hours. They picked up what they could from theelders of their families, and worked, as grandmother puts it, "as tight asthey could leg it" from morning to night. Everybody else worked that sameway, so the children did not know that they were being abused. Indeed, grandmother seemed to doubt if they were. 

At any rate, they all ran about as fast as ants in an ant-hill, and thebusiest of all was sixteen-year-old Hannah Sherwin. Since she was mygrandmother's grand mother's mother, at last the story is really begun. 

Hannah had been a baby of eighteen months when the Sherwins came over themountains from the old home in Connecticut, so she knew nothing about anyother way of living than what she saw in rough little Hillsboro. But herelder sister, Ann Mary, who was a tall girl of nineteen, remembered--orthought she remembered--big houses that were made all over of sawn planks, and chairs that were so shiny you could see your face in them or elsestuffed and cushioned in brocade as soft--"as soft as a feather tick!"she told Hannah. 

Her listener, having no idea of what brocade might be, and taking thefeather-tick simile literally, must have imagined a very queer kind ofchair. 

Hannah was a short, fair, rosy-cheeked child, who passed for good-lookingenough; but Ann Mary was slender and dark and a real beauty, althoughHillsboro people did not realize it. She looked fragile, as if she couldnot do much hard work and that is always a serious blemish in femininebeauty to the eyes of pioneers. 

So far in her life she had not been forced to do any hard work, becauseHannah had done it all for her. Their mother had died when they were bothlittle girls, and their father was so busy outdoors, every minute he wasawake, that, for all his affection for them, he did not know or care whichof his daughters cooked and washed, and swept and spun, so long as thesethings were done. And Hannah delighted to do them, because she adored AnnMary, and could not bear to have her sister troubled with any of thecoarse tasks which made up her own happy, busy day. 

Now, all that grandmother ever tells me about the beginning of this storyis that when the lovely Ann Mary was nineteen years old she "fell into adecline, " as they called it. She grew pale and thin, never smiled, couldnot eat or sleep, and lay listlessly on the bed all day, looking sadly atHannah as she bustled about. 

A great many girls in those days fell into declines and died. Of course, nobody knows the reason for most of the cases, but it seems as plain asthe nose on my face that Ann Mary's sickness was entirely Hannah's faultfor not letting her sister do her share of the household work. There shewas--pretty and ignorant and idle--with nothing to interest her, andnothing to look forward to, for in those days marriage was the only thinga girl could look forward to, and in the workaday little world of pioneerHillsboro nobody would dare to think of marrying a girl who looked like atea-rose and did not know how to make soft soap. No wonder she lost herappetite!

It might not have gone any further, however, if Hannah, distracted withanxiety, had not run to all the old women in town about her sick sister. Every one of them had had a niece, or a daughter--or at least agranddaughter--who had died in a decline; so, of course, they knew justwhat to do for Ann Mary, and they came and did it. 

Then poor Ann Mary was sick, indeed, I promise you! They shut her up inthe inner room of the little log house, although it was the end of May, and the weather was fit for the angels. They darkened the one window, andkept the door closed, and put the sick girl to bed between two mountainsof feathers. They gave her "sut" (soot) tea and "herb-drink" and steepedbutternut bark, and goodness knows what else; and they tiptoed in and out, and stared at her mournfully, and shook their heads and pursed up theirlips, until it is a wonder to me that Ann Mary did not die at once. 

II. 

Very likely she would have died, if one day in June there had not comethrough Hillsboro a trader on his way from "over the mountain" up toCanada, looking for furs. That morning, when Hannah got up, she found thefire in their big fireplace completely extinguished. She snatched up thewarming-pan--not a polished brass one with a smooth, turned handle, likethose you see in Colonial museums, but a common iron pan, fastened to ahickory sapling; and she went as fast as she could, without running--forgirls never ran "before folks" in those days--over to the nearestneighbor, to "borrow a handful of fire. "

The neighbors were just getting up, and their fire was too low to spareany, so Hannah had to wait until some hardwood sticks got well to burning. While she waited, the trader, who was staying overnight in that house, went on with a long story about an Indian herb-doctor, of whose cures hehad heard marvelous tales, three days' journey back. It seemed that theIndian's specialty was curing girls who had gone into a decline, and thathe had never failed in a single case he had undertaken. 

You can imagine how Hannah's loving, anxious heart leaped up, and howeagerly she questioned the trader about the road to the settlement wherethe Indian lived. It was in a place called Heath Falls, on the ConnecticutRiver, the trader told her; but he could not find words strong enough toadvise her against trying the trip. 

The trail lay through thick woods, filled with all the terrors of earlyNew Englanders--bears and wolves and catamounts. And when she got to HeathFalls, she would find it a very different place from Hillsboro, wherepeople took you in gladly for the sake of the news you brought from theoutside world. No, the folks in Heath Falls were very grand. They traveledthemselves, and saw more strangers than a little. You had to pay goodmoney for shelter and food, and, of course, the doctor did not cure fornothing. He was a kind man, the trader, and he did his best to keep Hannahfrom a wildly foolish enterprise. 

But his best was not good enough. She went home and looked at her poor AnnMary, as white as a snowdrift, her big dark eyes ringed with blackcircles, and Hannah knew only two things in the world--that there was adoctor who could cure her sister, and that she must get her to him. Shewas only a child herself; she had no money, no horses, no experience; butnothing made any difference to her. Ann Mary should go to the doctor, ifHannah had to carry her every step!

A spirit like that knows no obstacles. Although Hillsboro held up handsof horror, and implored John Sherwin to assert his parental authority andforbid his girl such a rash, unmaidenly, bold undertaking, the end of itwas that Hannah got her father's permission. He loved his daughtersdearly, did John Sherwin, and, although he could not see how the thing wasto be managed, he told Hannah she might go if she could. 

Now it happened that the wife of one of their neighbors had long covetedthe two great feather-beds between which Ann Mary lay sweltering. Hannahwent to her, and said that she could have them if she would loan her son, a sturdy boy of fourteen, and two horses, for the trip to Heath Falls. Theneighbor-woman hesitated; but when Hannah threw in the two pewtercandlesticks, which came from her mother's family, she could resist nolonger. In her own family they had only spike-iron candlesticks, and itwas her one chance of acquiring a pair of fine ones. So she wheedled herhusband into agreeing to the bargain; and there was Hannah with hertransportation provided. 

As soon as it was definitely settled that she was to make the longjourney, people began to; take rather a proud interest in her grit. Aseverybody liked her, they gave what they could toward helping her getready--all but the old women, who were furious that Ann Mary was to betaken away from their care. 

There was in town a saddle with a pillion back of it, and this was loanedfor Remember Williams, the neighbor's boy, to ride and carry Ann Marybehind him. Hannah folded a blanket across her horse's back, and sat onsideways as best she could. Behind her was a big bundle of extra clothing, and food, and an iron pot--or, as she called it, a "kittle"--for cookingtheir noonday meals. Her father brought out all the money he had--onelarge four-shilling piece--and Hannah was sure that so much wealth as thatwould buy anything in the world. The old women had prophesied that AnnMary would not be strong enough to sit upon a horse, even clinging toRemember Williams's thick waist; but, judging from what grandmother says, I surmise that Ann Mary, without being really aware of it, was a littlesick of being sick. At any rate, she took a great interest in thepreparations. She asked over and over again about the girls theherb-doctor had cured; and when the day for their departure came she wasquite pleased and excited, and walked out through the crowd of sympatheticneighbors. To be sure, she leaned weakly on her father, but there was alittle faint color in her cheeks. 

"A very bad sign!" the old women whispered. "She'll never live the journeyout. If only Hannah were not so headstrong and obstinate! But then youcan't blame the child for it--all the Sherwins are that way!"

As for Ann Mary, she sat up quite straight and looked as pretty aspossible when the little company rode off. After all, she had been"declining" only about a month, and people had vigorous constitutions inthose days. 

You may think it odd that she was not afraid to make the long journey, butthere are advantages in being of a dependent nature. Hannah had alwaysdone everything for her, and had kept her safe from harm. Hannah was withher now, so there was nothing to fear. She left all that to Hannah, whodid it, poor child, with the greatest thoroughness!

Now that the excitement of overcoming Hillsboro opposition was passed; nowthat they were really started, with herself as sole leader and guide, responsibility fell like a black cloud upon her young heart. There wasnothing she did _not_ fear--for Ann Mary, of course--from wolves andIndians to fatigue or thunderstorms. 

A dozen times that day, as they paced slowly over the rough trail, sheasked her sister anxiously if she were not too hot or too cold, or tootired or too faint, imitating as best she could the matter and manner ofthe doctoring old women. However, Ann Mary surprised herself, as well asHannah, by being none of the uncomfortable things that her sister keptsuggesting to her she might very well be. It was perfect June weather, they were going over some of the loveliest country in the world, and AnnMary was out of doors for the first time in four weeks or more. 

She "kept up" wonderfully well, and they made good time, reaching by dusk, as they had hoped to do, a farmer's house on the downward dip of themountain to the east. Here, their story being told, they were hospitablyreceived, and Ann Mary was clapped into the airless inner room and fedwith gruel and dipped toast. But she had had fresh air and exercise allday, and a hearty meal of cold venison and corn bread at their noondayrest, so she slept soundly. 

The next day they went across a wide, hilly valley, up another range oflow mountains, and down on the other side. The country was quite strangeto them, and somehow, before they knew it, they were not on the roadrecommended to them by their hosts of the night before. Night overtookthem when they were still, as the phrase has come down in our family, "ina miserable, dismal place of wood. "

Hannah's teeth chattered for very terror as she saw their plight; but shespoke cheerfully to Ann Mary and the boy, who looked to her for courage, and told them that they were to have the fun of sleeping under the stars. 

Boys were the same then as now, and Remember Williams was partly shiveringwith dread of bears and Indians and things, and partly glowing withanticipatory glory of telling the Hillsboro boys all about the adventure. Hannah soothed the first and inflamed the second emotion until she hadRemember strutting about gathering firewood, as brave as a lion. 

Very probably Ann Mary would have been frightened to death, if she had notbeen so sleepy from her long day out of doors that she could not keep hereyes open. And then, of course, everything must be all right, becausethere was Hannah!

This forlorn terrified little captain wrapped the invalid in all the extraclothing, managed to get a fire started, and cooked a supper of hotcornmeal mush in her big iron "kittle. " Ann Mary ate a great deal of this, sweetened as it was with maple sugar crumbled from the big lump Hannah Hadbrought along and immediately afterward she fell sound asleep. 

Soon the soft night air of June was too strong a soporific for Remember'sdesire to keep awake and hear the catamounts scream, as he had heard theydid in those woods. Hannah was left quite alone to keep watch and to tendthe fire, her heart in her mouth, jumping and starting at every shadowcast by the flames. 

She knew that wild beasts would not come near them if a big fire burnedbriskly; and all that night she piled on the wood, scraped away the ashes, and watched Ann Mary to see that she did not grow chilly. Hannah does notseem to have been much inclined to talk about her own feelings, and thereis no record of what she suffered that night; but I think we may be surethat it seemed a long time to her before the sky began to whiten in theeast. 

As soon as she could see plainly, she cooked a hearty breakfast of broiledbacon and fried mush, and wakened her two charges to eat it. They made avery early start, and there is nothing more to tell about their journeyexcept that at about seven o'clock that evening the two tiredhorses crept into the main street of Heath Falls, and a very much excitedgirl asked the first passer-by where the Indian herb-doctor lived. 

They found him in a little old house of logs--the only one that lookednatural to them in the prosperous settlement. When Hannah knocked at thedoor, he opened it himself. He was a small, very old, dark-brown, andprodigiously wrinkled individual, who held up a candle and looked atHannah with the most impassive eyes she had ever seen--like little poolsof black water unstirred by any wind. 

Hannah's breath came fast. 

"Is this the Indian herb-doctor?" she asked. 

"Aye, " he answered. 

When you remember that Hannah was only a little girl, and that she thoughtshe had come to the end of a nightmare of responsibility, it will notsurprise you to learn that she now began to cry a little, out ofagitation. 

"I have brought Ann Mary, " she said, "my sister, to be cured. She is in adecline. Will you cure her?"

The herb-doctor showed no surprise. He set the candle down on the shelf, and went out in the bright starlight to where Ann Mary clung to RememberWilliams's waist. When he put up his brown old hands to her, she slid downinto them and upon the ground. He still held one wrist, and this hecontinued to do for some moments, looking at the white, drooping girlwithout moving a muscle of his solemn old face. Then he turned to Hannah, who had stopped crying and was holding her breath in suspense. 

"Aye, " he said. 

At this Hannah caught her sister around the neck, sobbing joyfully:

"He will cure you, Ann Mary; he will cure you!" Then she asked the doctor:"And how long will it take? We can stay but a few days, for the boy andthe horses must get back soon. "

The herb-doctor considered for a moment. 

"It is now the end of June month. By the end of September month she willbe cured--not before. "

I think I know that that was a black moment for Hannah. She said nothingat all, but the sick girl fell to weeping. 

"But, Master Doctor, we cannot stay--we cannot! And now, after all, Ishall not be cured!"

Hannah could not bear to see her sweet Ann Mary in tears, and she criedout stoutly:

"Yes, you shall, too! Remember can take the horses back without us, andtell our father. Somehow--I can earn--oh, we _must_!" Then a new fearsprang into her heart. "Oh, sir, " she cried to the doctor, "is it dear, your cure? Must one have much silver for it?"

The stolid little old gnome did not look toward her or change his positionas he said:

"It costs time--no silver, " He moved toward the house. "Go to theminister's to-night, " he called from his doorstep. "It is the house ofbrick. " Just before he closed his door he added: "Come here to-morrowmorning. "

When they reached the great brick house, the other two hung back, afraidof so much grandeur; but three days of travel through the dangers of aprimitive forest had hardened Hannah to the lesser fear of strange people. To the old minister and his wife she told their story very briefly, with adesperate kind of self-possession, so concerned about poor Ann Mary, tiredand hungry, waiting out in the night air, that she did not remember to beafraid of the minister's fine linen and smooth, white hands, or of thelaces and dark silk of his handsome, white-haired wife, or of the goldbraid and red coat of a dark young man with a quick eye who sat in thecorner. 

The young man said nothing until after the old people had gone out tobring in the wanderers. Then:

"You must be fond, indeed, of your sister, my little lass, " he saidkindly. 

"Sir, " said Hannah, "you should _see_ my sister!"

And just then he did see her. Ann Mary came into the brightly lightedroom, her eyes wide and dark from the dusk outside, her long black hair, shaken loose from its fastenings, curling up beautifully with the dew, andmaking a frame for the pearl-like oval of her face. I have seen aminiature of Ann Mary in her youth, and I can guess how she must havelooked to the young officer that evening. 

The minister's wife gave them all a hot supper, and hurried them off tobed with motherly authority. For the first time in her life, Hannah foundherself between linen sheets. She tried to call her sister's attention tothis astonishing magnificence, but fell asleep in the middle of thesentence, and did not wake until late the next morning. Ann Mary had beenawake for some time, but did not dare get up, so overcome was she byshyness and reverence for the grandeur of the room and of her hosts. 

"Oh, Hannah! Would it not be like heaven to live always in such a place?"she said. 

Hannah could not stop to be shy, or to think about how she would likemahogany beds all the time. She had too much on her mind. They must go atonce to the herb-doctor's--they should have been there before--and theymust hurry through their breakfast. It is, perhaps, worthy of note thatboth girls came down the stairs backward, ladders having been, up to thattime, their only means of reaching elevations. 

During their breakfast, the dark young man, who turned out to be a cousinof the minister's, sat in a corner, playing with his dog's ears, andlooking at Ann Mary until she was quite abashed, although the youngergirl, at whom he glanced smilingly from time to time, thought he lookedvery good-natured. After this, Hannah sent Remember Williams home with thehorses, giving him fresh and elaborate directions about the right road totake. Then she marched Ann Mary to the herb-doctor's. 

"Here, Master Necronsett, " she said, "here is Ann Mary to be cured!"

III. 

When the doctor told them about his system, Hannah did not like the soundof it at all. Not a drop of "sut tea" or herb-drink was mentioned, but theinvalid was to eat all the hearty food Hannah could earn for her. Then, sofar from sleeping in a decently tight room, their bed was to stand in alittle old shed, set up against Master Necronsett's house. One side of theshed was gone entirely, so that the wind and the sun would come right inon poor, delicate Ann Mary, and there was only an awning of wovenbark-withes to let down when it rained. 

But even that was not the worst. Hannah listened with growing suspicionwhile Master Necronsett explained the rest of it. All his magic consistedin the use of a "witch plant, " the whole virtue of which depended on onething. The sick person must be the only one to handle or care for it, fromthe seed up to the mature plant. 

He took them up to his garret, where row after row of dried plants hung, heavy with seed-pods, and with the most careful precautions to avoidtouching them himself, or having Hannah do so, he directed Ann Mary to filla two-quart basin with the seed. 

"That will plant a piece of ground about six paces square, " he said. "Thatwill raise enough seed for you. "

"But who is to dig the ground, and plant, and weed, and water, and all?"asked Hannah. "If I am to be earning all day, when--"

"The sick person must do all, " said the herb-doctor. 

Hannah could not believe her senses. Her Ann Mary, who could not evenbrush her own hair without fatigue, she to take a spade in her--

"Oh, Master Doctor, " she cried, "can I not do it for her?"

The old Indian turned his opaque black eyes upon her. 

"Nay, " he said dryly, "you cannot. "

And with that he showed them where the witch garden was to be, closebefore their little sleeping-hut. That was why, he explained, the patientmust spend all her time there, so that by night, as well as by day, shecould absorb the magical virtues of the growing plant Hannah thought thosewere the first sensible words she had heard him say. 

She had promised the minister's wife to be back at a certain hour to seeabout employment, so she dared not stay longer, though it was with asinking heart that she left her sister to that grim old savage, with hisbrusque lack of sympathy. However, the minister's wife reassured her withstories of all the other girls from far and near whom he had cured by thatsame foolish, silly method; so Hannah turned all her energies upon thespinning which a neighbor-woman had set her to do. 

Hired workers have been the same from the days of the Psalmist down to ourown, and Hannah, putting her whole heart into her work, accomplished, soher surprised employer told her, twice as much spinning as anyserving-girl she had ever hired. 

"And excellent good thread, too!" she said, examining it. 

If Hannah kept up to _that_, she added, she could have all the work shehad time for. She gave the little girl two pennies--two real pennies, thefirst money Hannah had ever earned. With a head spinning with triumph, shecalculated that at that rate she could earn fourpence a day!

She spent a farthing for some fish a little boy brought up from the river, and a halfpenny for some fresh-baked bread, and a part of her preciousfour-shilling piece for an iron fry-pan, or "spider. " Laden with these, she hurried back to see how Ann Mary had endured the old doctor'sroughness. She found her sister very tired, but, proudly anxious to show alittle spot, perhaps six feet; square, which she had spaded up withintervals of rest. 

"The herb-doctor says that I have done well, and that I will finish thespading in a week, or perhaps even less, " she said: "and I _like_ MasterNecronsett! He is a good old man, and I know that he will cure me. Hemakes me feel very rested when he comes near. "

Hannah felt a little pang to think that her sister should not miss her ownbrooding care, but when Ann Mary cried out joyfully at the sight of thefood, "Oh, how hungry I am!" everything but pleasure was immediatelyswept away from the little sister's loyal heart. 

They cooked their supper--Hannah still had some of the cornmeal and theflitch of bacon their Hillsboro friends had given them--and went to beddirectly on the queer, hard bed, with a straw tick and no feathers, whichDr. Necronsett had prescribed, warmly wrapped up in the pair of heavyIndian blankets he had loaned them. They were so close to the house thatthey heard the old doctor moving around inside, and they could see thelight of his candle, so they were not afraid. 

Indeed, the two sisters were so sleepy that even if they had been timorousit could scarcely have kept them from the deep slumber into which theyfell at once, and which lasted until the sun shone in on them the nextmorning. 

IV. 

That was the first day of that wonderful summer, and most of the dayswhich followed were like it. Every morning Hannah rose early, made alittle open fire, cooked their breakfast, and was off to her spinning. Just as her first employer had said, there was no lack of work for aspinner who worked as fast and yet as carefully as if it were for herself. In Hannah's thread there were never any thin places which broke as soon asthe weaver stretched it on the loom, nor yet any thick lumps where thewool had insisted, in grandmother's phrase, "on going all kim-kam. "

At first, she went about to people's houses; but, seeing her so neat andcareful, the minister's wife loaned her one of her own wheels, and theminister had an old granary cleared out for her workroom. Here, day afterday, the wheel whirred unceasingly, like a great bee, and Hannah steppedback and forth, back and forth, on her tireless young feet, only glancingout through the big door at the bright glories of the summer weather, andnever once regretting her imprisonment. 

Indeed, she said, all her life afterward, that she was so happy, thatsummer, it seemed heaven itself could hold no greater joy for her. Ofcourse, first always in her thoughts was Ann Mary, pulling weeds andtending her witch garden, and growing plump and rosy, and so strong thatshe laughed and ran about and sang as never in her life before. 

Hannah put very little faith in the agricultural part of the cure. Shethought that very probably it was nothing more than a blind, and thatMaster Necronsett came out at night and said charms and things over AnnMary as she slept. However that might be, she could have kissed his funny, splay feet every time she looked at her sister's bright eyes and red lips;and when she thought of the joy it would be to her father, she could havekissed his ugly, wrinkled old face. 

But, besides her joy over her sister's health, the summer was for Hannahherself a continual feast of delight Captain Winthrop, the minister'syoung cousin, was staying in Heath Falls to recover from an arrow-woundgot in a skirmish with the Indians in Canada. He was very idle, and verymuch bored by the dullness of the little town, which seemed such ametropolis to the two girls from Hillsboro. One day, attracted by Hannah'sshining face of content, he lounged over to the step of her granary, andbegan to talk to her through the open doorway. 

It happened to come out that the little spinner, while she knew herletters from having worked them into a sampler, and could make shift towrite her name, could not read or write, and had never had the slightestinstruction in any sort of book-learning. Thereupon the young officergood-naturedly proposed to be her teacher, if Hannah would like. 

Would she _like_! She turned to him a look of such utter ecstasy that hewas quite touched, and went off at: once to get an old "A-B, ab" book. 

That was the beginning of a new world to Hannah. She took her younginstructor's breath away by the avidity with which she devoured thelessons he set her. By the rapt air of exultation with which Hannahrecited them, stepping back and forth by her wheel, you would havethought that "c-a-t, cat; r-a-t, rat, " was the finest poetry ever written. And in no time at all it was no longer "c-a-t, cat, " but "parallel, "and "phthisis, " and such orthographical atrocities, on which the eagerscholar was feeding; for, Hannah's mind was as fresh as her round, rosyface, and as vigorous as her stout little body. 

Captain Winthrop had several reasons for being interested in Hannah; andwhen he found her so quick at her spelling, he said he was willing tooccupy some of his enforced leisure in giving her instruction in otherbranches. Hannah fell to at this feast of knowledge like a young bear in abee-tree. 

But there were some difficulties. Like the spelling, arithmetic was allvery well, since she could do that in her head while she spun; but readingand writing were different. She would not stop her work for them, and soCaptain Winthrop fell into the habit of going over to Master Necronsett'shouse in the afternoon with his books, and being there, all ready for alesson, when Hannah came hurrying back after she had finished her day's"stint. " As long as there was light to see, she pored over her writing andreading, while the young officer sat by, ready to help, and talking in alow tone to Ann Mary. 

After a time there grew up a regular routine for Captain Winthrop. In themornings he went out to the granary and read aloud to Hannah from a bookcalled "The Universal Preceptor; being a General Grammar of Art, Science, and Useful Knowledge. " Out of this he taught her about "mechanical powers"and "animated nature" and astronomy and history and geography--almostanything that came to his hand. 

Up in our garret we have the very book he used, and modern research andscience have proved that there is scarcely a true word in it. But don'twaste any pity on Hannah for having such a mistaken teacher, for it islikely enough, don't you think, that research and science a hundred yearsfrom now will have proved that there is scarcely a word of truth in ourschool-books of to-day? It really doesn't seem to matter much. 

At any rate, those were the things of which Captain Winthrop talked toHannah in the mornings. In the afternoon, he went over to an apple-tree bythe edge of the witch garden, and there he found Ann Mary; and what hetalked to her about nobody knew but herself, although Master Necronsettpassed back and forth so often in his herb-gathering that it is likely hemay have caught something. It seems not improbable, from what happenedafterward, that the young man was telling the young girl things which didnot come out of a book, and which are consequently safe from science andresearch, for they are certainly as true to-day as they were then. 

Once, in her anxiety to have everything exactly right for her sister, Hannah asked Master Necronsett about Captain Winthrop's being there somuch. 

"Master Doctor, will not Captain Winthrop absorb, perchance, some of thegreat virtue of the plant away from Ann Mary? Will he not hurt her cure?"

Grandmother never says so, but I have always imagined that even thatcarven image of an old aborigine must, have smiled a little as he toldher:

"Nay, the young man will not hurt your sister's cure. "

At the end of September, something tremendously exciting happened toHannah. She had been so busy learning the contents of that old calf-boundbook that she had never noticed how a light seemed to shine right throughAnn Mary's lovely face every time Captain Winthrop looked at her. Thelittle student was the most surprised girl in the world when the youngsoldier told her, one morning in the granary, that he wanted her sisterto marry him, and that Ann Mary wanted it, too, if Hannah would allow it. 

He laughed a little as he said this last, but he looked anxiously at her, for Ann Mary, who was as sweet as she was pretty and useless, had felt itto be a poor return for Hannah's devotion, now after all, just to go offand desert her. She had said that, if Hannah thought she ought to, shewould go back to Hillsboro, and they would have to wait ever so long. Sonow Captain Winthrop looked very nervously at Ann Mary's little sister. 

But he did not know Hannah. She gave a little cry, as if someone hadstabbed her, turned very pale, and, leaving her wheel still whirling, sheran like the wind toward Dr. Necronsett's. She wanted to see her sister;she wanted to _see_ if this----

Close to the minister's house she met Ann Mary, who could not wait anylonger, and was coming to meet her. After one glimpse of that beautiful, radiant face, Hannah fell a weeping for very joy that her dear Ann Marywas so happy, and was to marry the grand and learned and goodly CaptainWinthrop. 

There was not a thought in Hannah's mind, then or later, that she mustlose Ann Mary herself. Grandmother explains here that the truth is that aheart like Hannah's cannot lose anything good; and perhaps that is so. 

Thus, hand in hand, laughing and crying together, the two girls came backto the granary, where Ann Mary's lover took her in his arms and kissed hermany times out of light-heartedness that Hannah would put no obstacle inthe way. This made little Hannah blush and feel very queer. She lookedaway, and there was her wheel still languidly stirring a little. Dear me!How many, many times have I heard the next detail in the story told!

"And, without really, so to speak, sensing what she was doing, didn't sheput her hand to the rim and start it up again? And when the other twolooked around at her, there she was, spinning and smiling, with the tearsin her eyes. It had all happened in less time than it takes a spin-wheelto run down. "

After that day things happened fast. Captain Winthrop rode off over themountains to Hillsboro, to ask John Sherwin if he might marry hisdaughter; and when he came back, there was John Sherwin himself ridingalong beside him, like an old friend. And when he saw his two deardaughters--Ann Mary, who had gone away like a lily, now blooming like arose, and Hannah, stout little Hannah, with her honest blue eyesshining--when he saw his two daughters, I say--well, I'm sure I have noidea what happened, for at this point grandmother always takes off herglasses, and sniffs hard, and wipes her eyes before she can go on. 

So there was a wedding at the minister's house, and everybody in HeathFalls was invited, because Hannah said they had been so good to her. Everybody came, too, except old Master Necronsett, and that was nothing, because he never went anywhere except to the woods. 

I know just what the bride and Hannah wore, for we have pieces of thematerial in our oldest cedar chest; but, of course, as they weren't yourown great-great-great-grandmother and aunt, perhaps you wouldn't care tohave me tell you all about their costumes. It was a grand occasion, however--that you can take from me; and the family tradition is that AnnMary looked like a wonderful combination of an angel and a star. 

And then Captain and Mrs. Winthrop rode off in one direction, and Hannahand her father in another, and there were a great many tears shed, for alleverybody; was so happy. 

VI. 

Hannah went home with her head full of new ideas, and with four books inher saddle-bags--which, for those days, was a large library. These werethe Bible, the "Universal Preceptor, " a volume of the Shakespearecomedies, and Plutarch's "Lives. " Armed with these weapons, how she didstir things up in Hillsboro! She got the children together into a school, and taught them everything she had learned in Heath Falls; and that wasso much--what with the studying which she always kept up by herself--thatfrom our little scrap of a village three students went down to the collegeat William's Town, in Massachusetts, the first year it was started, andthere has been a regular procession of them ever since. 

After a time she married Giles Wheeler, and began to teach her ownchildren--she had nine--and very well instructed they were. She was toobusy, then, to go into the schoolroom to teach; but never, then or later, even when she was an old, old woman, did she take her vigilant eyes andher managing hand off the schools of our county. 

It was due to her that Hillsboro could boast for so long that itspercentage of illiterates was zero. If, by chance, anyone grew up withoutknowing how to read, Aunt Hannah pounced on him and made him learn, whether he would or not. She loaned about, to anyone who would read them, the books she brought from Heath Falls; and in time she started a littlelibrary. Remembering the days when Captain Winthrop had read aloud to herin the granary, she had her children go about to read aloud to sickpeople, and to busy seamstresses or spinners who had no time for books. 

And the number of girls in declines she cured by Master Necronsett'ssystem! You would not believe it, if I told you. And she had our rivernamed after that wise old heathen, and we think it the prettiest namepossible for a river. 

All this time, Ann Mary's position was getting grander and grander, forCaptain Winthrop was on the American side when the Revolution came, andgrew to be a very important man. Ann Mary dressed in brocade every day andall day, and went to Philadelphia, where she met General and Mrs. Washington, and ever so many more famous people. 

Wherever she went, she was admired and loved for her beauty andgentleness; but she did not forget Hannah. Nearly every traveler from theSouth brought a message or a present from Madam Winthrop to MistressWheeler, and once she and General Winthrop came and made a long visit inHillsboro. 

Grandmother's grandmother was old enough, by that time, to remember thevisit very clearly; and it was from talk between the two sisters that shelearned all about this story. She said she never saw a more beautifulwoman than Madam Winthrop, nor heard a sweeter voice. But how Hannah hadto hush the unmannerly surprise of her brood of quick-witted youngsterswhen they found out that elegant Aunt Ann Mary did not know her letters, and had never heard of Julius Caesar or Oliver Cromwell! For marriage didnot change Ann Mary very much; but as her husband was perfectly satisfiedwith her, I dare say it was just as well. 

However, when the Winthrop cousins begin to put on airs, and to talk aboutautograph letters from Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson addressed to theirgreat-great-great-grandmother, and to show beautiful carved fans andlace handkerchiefs which she carried at State balls in Philadelphia andNew York, I have to bite my tongue to keep from reminding them that theyhave no autograph letters of _hers_!

Then I go up into our garret, and look at Hannah's shabby old books, and Iride over to the place on the road where she tended the fire that night, and I think of the number of Hillsboro boys and girls to whom she openedthe great world of books, and--somehow, I am just as well pleased that itwas not the lovely Ann Mary who came back to our town and became mygreat-great-great-grandmother. 

THE DELIVERER

"I shall not die, but live; and declare the works of the Lord. "

The great lady pointed with a sigh of pleasure to the canvas hung betweena Greuze and a Watteau! "Ah, is there anyone like LeMaury! Alone in theeighteenth century he had eyes for the world of wood and stream. You poets and critics, why do you never write of him? Is it true that noone knows anything of his life?"

The young writer hesitated. "I do not think I exaggerate, madame, when Isay that I alone in Paris know his history. He was a compatriot of mine. "

"Oh, come, Mr. Everett, LeMaury an American! With that name!"

"He called himself LeMaury after his protector, the man who brought himto France. His real name was Everett, like my own. He was cousin to one ofmy great-grandfathers. "

"Ah, an old family story. That is the best kind. You must tell it to me. "

"I will write it for you, madame. "

I

At the foot of Hemlock Mountain spring came late that year, now a centuryand a half gone by, as it comes late still to the remote back valley, lying high among the Green Mountains; but when it came it had a savor ofenchantment unknown to milder regions. The first day of spring was nouncertain date in Hillsboro, then as now. One morning generally about themiddle of May, people woke up with the sun shining in their eyes, and thefeeling in their hearts that something had happened in the night. Thefirst one of the family dressed, who threw open the house-door, felt theodor of stirring life go to his head, was the Reverend Mr. Everetthimself. In the little community of Puritans, whose isolation hadpreserved intact the rigidity of faith which had begun to soften somewhatin other parts of New England, there was no one who openly saluted themiracle of resurrection by more than the brief remark, "Warm weather'scome"; but sometimes the younger men went back and kissed their wives. Itwas an event, the first day of spring, in old-time Hillsboro. 

In the year of our Lord 1756 this event fell upon a Sabbath, a fact whichthe Reverend Mr. Everett commemorated by a grim look out at the buddingtrees, and by taking from his store of sermons a different one from thathe had intended to preach. It was his duty to scourge natural man out ofthe flock committed to his charge by an angry and a jealous God, and hehad felt deep within him a damnable stirring of sensual pleasure as theperfumed breath of the new season had blown across his face. If theanointed of the Lord had thus yielded to the insidious wiles ofunregenerate nature what greater dangers lay in wait for the weaklingsunder his care! The face of his son Nathaniel, as he came back from thebrook, his slender body leaning sideways from the weight of the drippingbucket, told the shepherd of souls that he must be on his guard againstthe snares of the flesh. 

The boy's thin, dark face, so astonishingly like his father's, was liftedtoward the sky as he came stumbling up the path, but his eyes wereeverywhere at once. Just before he reached the door, he set the bucketdown with a cry of ecstasy and darted to the edge of the garden, where thepeas were just thrusting green bowed heads through the crumbling earth. Heknelt above them breathless, he looked up to the maple-twigs, over which afaint reddish bloom had been cast in the night, beyond to the lower slopesof the mountain, delicately patterned with innumerable white stems ofyoung birch-trees, and clasped his hands to see that a shimmer of greenhung in their tops like a mist. His lips quivered, he laid his hand upon atuft of grass with glossy, lance-like blades, and stroked it. 

His father came to the door and called him. "Nathaniel!"

He sprang up with guilty haste and went toward the house. A shrivelingchange of expression came over him. 

The minister began, "A wise son heareth his father's instructions; but ascorner heareth not rebuke. "

"I hear you, father. "

"Why did you linger in the garden and forget your duty?"

"I--I cannot tell you, father. "

"Do you mean you do not know why?"

"I cannot say I do not know. "

"Then answer me. "

Nathaniel broke out desperately, "I _cannot_, father--I know no words--Iwas--it is so warm--the sun shines--the birches are out--I was glad----"

The minister bowed his head sadly. "Aye, even as I thought. Sinful lust ofthe eye draggeth you down to destruction. You whose salvation even nowhangs in the balance, for whose soul I wrestle every night in prayer thatyou may be brought to the conviction of sin, 'you were glad. ' Remember thewords, 'If I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy, may my tongue cleaveto the roof of my mouth. '"

Nathaniel made no reply. He caught at the door, looking up wretchedly athis father. When the minister turned away without speaking again, he drewa long breath of relief. 

Breakfast was always a silent meal in the Everett house, but on Sabbathmornings the silence had a heavy significance. The preacher was beginningthen to work himself up to the pitch of storming fervor which made hissermons so notable, and his wife and son cowered under the unspokenemanations of the passion which later poured so terribly from the pulpit. The Reverend Mr. Everett always ate very heartily on Sabbath mornings, butNathaniel usually pushed his plate away. 

As a rule he walked to church between his father and his mother, like alittle child, although he was now a tall lad of sixteen, but to-day he wassent back for a psalm-book, forgotten in the hurry of their early start. When he set out again the rest of the village folk were all in themeeting-house. The sight of the deserted street, walled in by the forest, lying drowsily in the spring sunshine, was like balm to him. He loiteredalong, free from observation, his eyes shining. A fat, old negro womansat on a doorstep in the sun, the only other person not in meeting. Shewas a worn-out slave, from a Connecticut seaport, who had been thrown infor good measure in a sharp bargain driven by the leading man ofHillsboro. A red turban-like cloth was bound above her black face, sherested her puffy black arms across her knees and crooned a monotonousrefrain. Although the villagers regarded her as imbecile, they thought herharmless, and Nathaniel nodded to her as he passed. She gave him a richlaugh and a "Good morrow, Marse Natty, _good_ morrow!"

A hen clucking to her chicks went across the road before him. The littleyellow balls ran briskly forward on their wiry legs, darting at invisibleinsects, turning their shiny black eyes about alertly and filling the airwith their sweet, thin pipings. Nathaniel stopped to watch them, and as henoticed the pompously important air with which one of the tiny creaturesscratched the ground with his ineffectual little feet, cocking his eyeupon the spot afterward as if to estimate the amount of progress made, theboy laughed out loud. He started at the sound and glanced around himhurriedly, moving on to the meeting-house from which there now burst fortha harshly intoned psalm. He lingered for a moment at the door, gazing backat the translucent greens of the distant birches gleaming against theblack pines. A gust of air perfumed with shad-blossom blew past him, andwith this in his nostrils he entered the whitewashed interior and made hisway on tiptoe up the bare boards of the aisle. 

II

After meeting the women and children walked home to set out the coldviands for the Sabbath dinner, while the men stood in a group on the greenbefore the door for a few minutes' conversation. 

"Verily, Master Everett, the breath of the Almighty was in your words thisday as never before, " said one of them. "One more such visitation of theanger of God and your son will be saved. "

"How looked he when they bore him out?" asked the minister faintly. Hisface was very white. 

The other continued, "Truly, reverend sir, your setting forth of the devillying in wait for the thoughtless, and the lake burning with brimstone, did almost affright me who for many years now have known myself to be ofthe elect. I could not wonder that terrors melted the soul of your son. "

"How looked he when they bore him out?" repeated the minister impatiently. 

The other answered encouragingly, "More like death than life, so the womensay. " The minister waved the men aside and went swiftly down the street. The hen and chickens fled with shrill cries at his approach, and the oldnegress stopped her song. After he had passed she chuckled slowly toherself, thrust her head up sideways to get the sun in a new place, andbegan her crooning chant afresh. 

"How is the boy?" asked the minister of his wife as he stepped inside thedoor. "Not still screaming out and----"

Mistress Everett shook her head reassuringly. "Nay, he is quiet now, up inhis room. "

Nathaniel lay on his trundle bed, his eyes fixed on the rafters, his palelips drawn back. At the sight his father sat down heavily on the edge ofthe bed. The boy sprang upon him with a cry, "Oh, father, I see firealways there--last winter when I burned my finger--oh, always such pain!"

The minister's voice broke as he said, "Oh, Nathaniel, the blessed easewhen all this travail is gone by and thou knowest thyself to be of theelect. "

Nathaniel screamed out at this, a fleck of froth showing on his lips. "That is the horrible thing--I know I am not one of the saved. My heart isall full of carnal pleasures and desires. To look at the sun on thehillside--why I love it so that I forget my soul--hell--God--"

His father gave a deep shocked groan and put his hand over the quiveringlips. "Be not a bitterness to him that begot you. Hush!"

The fever of excitement left the boy and he fell down with his face in thepillow to lie there motionless until his parents went out for secondmeeting, leaving him alone in the house. "Confidence must be rooted out ofhis tabernacle, " said his father sternly. "The spirit of God is surelyworking in his heart in which I see many of my own besetting sins. "

Nathaniel sprang up, when he heard the door shut, with a distracted ideaof escape, now that his jailers were away, and felt an icy stirring in theroots of his hair at the realization that his misery lay within, that thewalls of his own flesh and blood shut it inexorably into his heartforever. He threw open the window and leaned out. 

The old negress came out of the woods at the other end of the street, herturban gleaming red. She moved in a cautious silence past themeeting-house, but when she came opposite the minister's house, thinkingherself alone, she burst into a gay, rapid song, the words of which she somutilated in her barbarous accent that only a final "Oh, Molly-oh!" couldbe distinguished. She carried an herb-basket on her arm now, into which, from time to time, she looked with great satisfaction. 

Nathaniel ran down the stairs and out of the door calling. She paused, startled. "How can you sing and laugh and walk so lightly?" he cried out. 

She cocked her head on one side with her turtle-like motion. "Why shouldshe not sing?" she asked in her thick, sweet voice. She had never learnedthe difference between the pronouns. "She's be'n gatherin' yarbs in thewood, an' th' sun is warm, " she blinked at it rapidly, "an' the winter itis pas', Marse Natty, no mo' winter!"

Nathaniel came close up to her, laying his thin fingers on her fat, blackarm. His voice quivered. "But they say if you love those things and ifthey make you glad you are damned to everlasting brimstone fire. Tell mehow you dare to laugh, so that I will dare too. "

The old woman laughed, opening her mouth so widely that the red lining toher throat showed moistly, and all her fat shook on her bones. "Lord loveye, chile, dat's white folks' talk. Dat don't scare a old black woman!"She shifted her basket to the other arm and prepared to go on. "You'rebleeged to be keerful 'bout losin' yo' soul. Black folks ain't got nosouls, bless de Lord! When _dey_ dies dey _dies_!"

She shuffled along, laughing, and began to sing again. Nathaniel lookedafter her with burning eyes. After she had disappeared between the treetrunks of the forest, the breeze bore back to him a last joyous whoop of"_Oh_, Molly-oh!" He burst into sobs, and shivering, made his way backinto his father's darkening, empty house. 

III

At the breakfast table the next morning his father looked at himneutrally. "This day you shall go to salt the sheep in the Miller lot, " heannounced, "and you may have until the hour before sundown to walk in thewood. "

"Oh, _father_, really!"

"That is what I said, " repeated the minister dryly, pushing away from thetable. 

After the boy had gone, carrying the bag of salt and the little package ofhis noonday meal, the minister sighed heavily. "I fear my weak heartinclines me to too great softness to our son. " To his wife he cried out amoment later, "Oh, that some instance of the wrath of Jehovah could comebefore us now, while our son's spirit is softened. Deacon Truitt saidyesterday that one more visitation would save him. "

Nathaniel walked along soberly, his eyes on the road at his feet, his facequite pale, a sleepless night evidently behind him. He came into thebirches without noticing them at first, and when he looked up he was for amoment so taken by surprise that he was transfigured. The valley at hisfeet shimmered like an opal through the slender white pillars of thetrees. The wood was like a many-columned chapel, unroofed and open to thesunlight. Nathaniel gave a cry of rapture, and dropped the bag of salt. "Oh!" he cried, stretching out his arms, and then again, "Oh!"

For a moment he stood so, caught into a joy that was almost anguish, andthen at a sudden thought he shrank together, his arm crooked over hiseyes. He sank forward, still covering his eyes, into a great bed of fern, just beginning to unroll their whitey-green balls into long, pale plumes. There he lay as still as if he were dead. 

Two men came riding through the lane, their horses treading noiselesslyover the leaf-mold. They had almost passed the motionless, prostratefigure when the older reined in and pointed with his whip. "What is that, LeMaury?"

At the unexpected sound the boy half rose, showing a face so convulsedthat the other horseman cried out alarmed, "It ees a man crazed! Ride on, _mon colonel_!" He put spurs to his horse and sprang forward as he spoke. 

The old soldier laughed a little, and turned to Nathaniel. "Why, 'tis theminister his son. I know you by the look of your father in you. What baddream have we waked you from, you pretty boy?"

"You have not waked me from it, " cried Nathaniel. "I will never wake aslong as I live, and when I die--!"

"Why, LeMaury is right. The poor lad is crazed. We must see to this. "

He swung himself stiffly from the saddle and came limping up to Nathaniel. Kneeling by the boy he brought him up to a sitting position, and at thesight of the ashen face and white, turned-back eyeballs he sat downhastily, drawing the young head upon his shoulder with a rough tenderness. "Why, so lads look under their first fire, when they die of fear. Whatfrights you so?"

Nathaniel opened great solemn eyes upon him. "I suppose it is theconviction of sin. That is what they call it. "

For an instant the old man's face was blank with astonishment, and then itwrinkled into a thousand lines of mirth. He began to laugh as though hewould never stop. Nathaniel had never heard anyone laugh like that. Heclutched at the old man. 

"How dare you laugh!"

The other wiped his eyes and rocked to and fro, "I laugh--who wouldnot--that such a witless baby should talk of his sin. You know not whatsin is, you silly innocent!"

At the kindliness of the tone an aching knot in the boy's throat relaxed. He began to talk hurriedly, in a desperate whisper, his hands like littlebirds' claws gripping the other's great gauntleted fist. "You do not knowhow wicked I am--I am so wholly forward the wonder is the devil does nottake me at once. I live only in what my father calls the lust of the eye. I--I would rather look at a haw-tree in bloom than meditate on theAlmighty!" He brought out this awful confession with a gasp at itsenormity, but hurried on to a yet more terrible climax. "I cannot berighteous, but many times there are those who cannot--but oh, worse thanthat, I cannot even _wish_ to be! I can only wish to be a painter. "

At this unexpected ending the old man gave an exclamation of extremeamazement. 

"But, boy, lad, what's your name? However did you learn that there arepainters in the world, here in this prison-house of sanctity?"

Nathaniel had burrowed into his protector's coat as though hiding from theimminent wrath of God. He now spoke in muffled tones. "Two years ago, whenI was but a little child, there came a man to our town, a Frenchman, theysaid, and his horse fell lame, and he stopped two days at my UncleElzaphan's. My Uncle Elzaphan asked him what business did he in the world, and he said he put down on cloth or paper with brushes and colors all thefair and comely things he saw. And he showed a piece of paper with on itpainted the row of willows along our brook. I sat in the chimney-cornerand no one heeded me. I saw--oh, then I _knew_! I have no paint, but eversince I have made pictures with burnt sticks on birchbark--though myfather says that of all the evil ways of evil men none lead down moreswift to the chambers of death and the gates of hell than that. Everynight I make a vow unto the Lord that I will sin no more; but in themorning the devil whispers in my ear and I rise up and sin again--no manknows this--and I am never glad unless I think I have done well with mypictures, and I hate the meeting-house and--" His voice died awaymiserably. 

"Two years ago, was't?" asked the old man. "And the man was French?"

"Aye. "

The old soldier shifted his position, stretched out a stiff knee with agrimace of pain, and pulled the tall lad bodily into his lap like a child. For some time the two were silent, the sun shining down warmly on themthrough the faint, vaporous green of the tiny leaves. The old horsecropped the young shoots with a contented, ruminative air, once in a whilepausing to hang his head drowsily, and bask motionless in the warmth. 

Then the old man began to speak in a serious tone, quite different fromhis gentle laughter. "Young Everett, of all the people you have seen, isthere one whom you would wish to have even a moment of the tortures ofhell?"

Nathaniel looked at him horrified. "Why, no!" he cried indignantly. 

"Then do you think your God less merciful than you?"

Nathaniel stared long into the steady eyes. "Oh, do you mean it is not_true_?" He leaned close in an agony of hope. "Sometimes I have thought it_could_ not be true!"

The old soldier struck him on the shoulder inspiritingly, hisweather-beaten face very grave. "Aye, lad, I mean it is not true. I am anold man and I have learned that they lie who say it is true. There is nohell but in our own hearts when we do evil; and we can escape a way out ofthat by repenting and doing good. There is no devil but our evil desires, and God gives to every man strength to fight with those. There is onlygood in your love for the fair things God made and put into the world forus to love. No man but only your own heart can tell you what is wrong andwhat is right. Only _do not fear_, for all is well. "

The scene was never to fade from Nathaniel Everett's eyes. In all theafter crises of his life the solemn words rang in his ears. 

The old man suddenly smiled at him, all quaint drollery again. "And nowwait. " He put hand to mouth and hallooed down the lane. "Ho there!LeMaury!"

As the Frenchman came into sight, the old man turned to Nathaniel, "Isthis the gentleman who painted your willows?"

"Oh, aye!" cried Nathaniel. 

The Frenchman dismounted near them with sparkling glances of inquiry. "See, LeMaury, this is young Master Everett, whom you have bewitched withyour paint-pots. He would fain be an artist--_de gustibus_--! Perhaps youhave in him an apprentice for your return to France. "

The artist looked sharply at Nathaniel. "Eh, so? Can young master draw?Doth he know aught of _chiaroscuro_?"

Nathaniel blushed at his ignorance and looked timidly at his protector. 

"Nay, he knows naught of your painter's gibberish. Give him a crayon and abit of white bark and see can he make my picture. I'll lean my head backand fold my hands to sleep. "

In the long sunny quiet that followed, the old man really slipped awayinto a light doze, from which he was awakened by a loud shout fromLeMaury. The Frenchman had sprung upon Nathaniel and was kissing hischeeks, which were now crimson with excitement. "Oh, it is Giotto comeback again. He shall be anything--Watteau. "

Nathaniel broke away and ran toward the old man, his eyes blazing withhope. 

"What does he mean?" he demanded. 

"He means that you're to be a painter and naught else, though how a mancan choose to daub paint when there are swords to be carried--well, well, "he pulled himself painfully to his feet, wincing at gouty twinges, "I willgo and see your father about--"

"_Mais, Colonel Hall, dites_! How can I arrange not to lose this pearlamong artists?"

At the name, for he had not understood the title before, pronounced as itwas in French, the boy fell back in horrified recognition. "Oh! you areColonel Gideon Hall!"

"Aye, lad, who else?" The old soldier swung himself up to the saddle, groaning, "Oh, damn that wet ground! I fear I cannot sit the nag home. "

"But then you are the enemy of God--the chosen one of Beelzebub----"

"Do they call me _that_ in polite and pious Hillsboro?"

The Frenchman broke in, impatient of this incomprehensible talk. "See, boy, you--Everett--I go back to France now soon. I lie next Friday nightat Woodburn. If you come to me there we will go together to France--toParis--you will be the great artist----"

He was silenced by a gesture from the colonel, who now sat very straighton his horse and beckoned to Nathaniel. The boy came timorously. "You haveheard lies about me, Everett. Be man enough to trust your own heart. " Hebroke into a half-sad little laugh at Nathaniel's face of fascinatedrepulsion. 

"You can laugh now, " whispered the boy, close at his knee, "but when youcome to die? Why, even my father trembles at the thought of death. Oh, ifI could but believe you!"

"Faugh! To fear death when one has done his best!"

He had turned his horse's head, but Nathaniel called after him, bringingout the awful words with an effort. "But they say--that you do not believein God. "

The colonel laughed again. "Why, lad, I'm the only man in this damn townwho does. " He put his horse into a trot and left Nathaniel under thebirch-trees, the sun high over his head, the bag of salt forgotten at hisfeet. 

IV

A little before sundown the next day the minister strode into his house, caught up his Bible, and called to his wife, "Deborah, the Lord hathanswered me in my trouble. Call Nathaniel and bring him after me to thehouse of Gideon Hall. "

Mistress Everett fell back, her hand at her heart, "To _that_ house?"

"Aye, even there. He lieth at the point of death. So are the wickedbrought into desolation. Yesterday, as he rode in the wood, his horse casthim down so that it is thought he may not live till dark. I am sent for byhis pious sisters to wrestle with him in prayer. Oh, Deborah, now is thetime to strike the last blow for the salvation of our son. Let him see howthe devil carries off the transgressor into the fires of hell, or let himsee how, at the last, the proudest must make confession of his wickedunbelief----"

He hurled himself through the door like a javelin, while his wife turnedto explain to Nathaniel the reason for the minister's putting on hisSabbath voice of a week-day morning. He cried out miserably, "Oh, mother, _don't_ make me go there!"

"Nay, Nathaniel, there is naught new. You have been with us before to manya sickbed and seen many a righteous death. This is an ill man, whoseterrors at the reward of his unbelief will be like goodly medicine to yoursick soul, and teach you to lay hold on righteousness while there is yettime. "

"But, mother, my Uncle Elzaphan said--I asked him this morning aboutColonel Hall--that he had done naught but good to all men, that he hadfought bravely with French and Indians, that the poor had half of hisgoods, that--"

She took him by the hand and dragged him relentlessly out upon the street. "Your Uncle Elzaphan is a man of no understanding, and does not know thatthe devil has no more subtile lure than a man who does good works but whois not of the true faith. Aye, he maketh a worse confusion to the simplethan he who worketh iniquity by noonday. "

She led him through the village street, through a long curving lane wherehe had never been before, and down an avenue of maple-trees to a house atwhich he had always been forbidden even to look. Various of the neighborwomen were hurrying along in the same direction. As they filed up thestairs he trembled to hear his father's voice already raised in theterrible tones of one of his inspired hours. At the entrance to the sickchamber he clung for a moment to the door, gazing at the wild-eyed womenwho knelt about the room, their frightened eyes fixed on his father. Hisknees shook under him. He had a qualm of nausea at the slimy images ofcorruption and decay which the minister was trumpeting forth as the end toall earthly pride. 

His mother pushed him inexorably forward into the room, and then, acrossthe nightmare of frenzy, he met the calm gaze of the dying man. It was theturning-point of his life. 

He ran to the bed, falling on his knees, clasping the great knotty handand searching the eyes which were turned upon him, gently smiling. Theminister, well pleased with this evidence of his son's emotion, caught hisbreath for another flight of eloquence which should sear and blast thepretensions of good works as opposed to the true faith. "See how low theLord layeth the man who thinks to bargain with the Almighty, and to ransomhis soul from hell by deeds which are like dust and ashes to Jehovah. "

Nathaniel crept closer and whispered under cover of his father'sthunderings, "Oh, you are truly not afraid?"

The dying man looked at him, his eyes as steady as when they were in thewoods. "Nay, little comrade, it is all a part of life. "

After that he seemed to sink into partial unconsciousness. Nathaniel felthis hand grow colder, but he still held it, grasping it more tightly whenhe felt the fumes of his father's reeking eloquence mount to his brain. The women were all sobbing aloud. A young girl was writhing on the floor, her groans stifled by her mother's hand. The air of the room was stiflingwith hysteria. The old sister of the dying man called out, "Oh, quick, Master Everett. He is going. Exhort him now to give us some token that atthe last he repents of his unbelief. "

The minister whirled about, shaking with his own violence. The sweat wasrunning down his face. "Gideon Hall, I charge you to say if you repent ofyour sins. "

There was a pause. The silence was suffocating. 

The old man gradually aroused himself from his torpor, although he did notopen his eyes. "Aye, truly I repent me of my sins, " he whispered mildly, "for any unkindness done to any man, or----"

The minister broke in, his voice mounting shrilly, "Nay, not so, thousubtle mocker. Dost thou repent thee of thy unbelief in the true faith?"

Colonel Gideon Hall opened his eyes. He turned his head slowly on thepillow until he faced the preacher, and at the sight of his terrible eyesand ecstatic pallor he began to laugh whimsically, as he had laughed inthe wood with Nathaniel. "Why, man, I thought you did but frighten womenwith it--not yourself too. Nay, do not trouble about me. _I_ don't believein your damned little hell. "

The smile on his face gradually died away into a still serenity, which wasthere later, when the minister lifted his son away from the dead man'sbed. 

V

The four old men walked sturdily forward with their burden, although atintervals they slipped their tall staves under the corners and rested, wiping their foreheads and breathing hard. As they stood thus silent, where the road passed through a thicket of sumac, a boy came rapidlyaround the curve and was upon them before he saw that he was not alone. He stopped short and made a guilty motion to hide a bundle that hecarried. The old men stared at him, and reassured by this absence ofrecognition he advanced slowly, looking curiously at the great scarletflag which hung in heavy folds from their burden. 

"Is this the road to Woodburn?" he asked them. 

"Aye, " they answered briefly. 

He had almost passed them when he stopped again, drawing in his breath. 

"Oh, are you--is this Colonel--"

"Aye, lad, " said the oldest of the bearers, "this is the funeralprocession of the best commander and truest man who ever lived. "

"But why--" began the boy, looking at the flag. 

"He's wrapped in the flag of the king that he was a loyal servant to, because the damned psalm-singing hypocrites in the town where he lived oflate would not make a coffin for him--no, nor allow ground to buryhim--no, nor men to bear him out to his grave! We be men who have servedunder him in three wars, and we come from over the mountain to do the lastservice for him. He saved our lives for us more than once--brave ColonelGid!"

They all uncovered at the name, and the boy shyly and awkwardly took hiscap off. 

"May I--may I see him once again?" he asked, dropping his bundle. "Hesaved my life too. "

Two men put their gnarled old hands to the flag and drew it down from thehead of the bier. The boy did not speak, but he went nearer and nearerwith an expression on his face which one of the old men answered aloud. "Aye, is he not at peace! God grant we may all look so when the timecomes. "

They let the flag fall over the dead face again, set their shoulders tothe bier, and moved forward, bringing down their great staves rhythmicallyas they walked. The boy stood still looking after them. When they passedout into the sunshine of the open hillside he ran to the edge of thethicket so that he could still follow them with his eyes. They plodded on, growing smaller and smaller in the distance, until as they paused on thecrest of the hill only a spot of red could be seen, brilliant against thebrilliant sky. 

The boy went back and picked up his bundle. When he returned to the edgeof the thicket the spot of red was disappearing over the hill. He took offhis cap and stood there until there was nothing before him but the sunshining on the hillside. 

Then he turned about, and walking steadily, Nathaniel Everett entered intohis own world. 

NOCTES AMBROSIANAE

 From Hemlock Mountain's barren crest The roaring gale flies down the west And drifts the snow on Redmount's breast In hollows dark with pine. 

 Full in its path from hill to hill There stands, beside a ruined mill, A lonely house, above whose sill A brace of candles shine. 

 And there an ancient bachelor And maiden sister, full three-score, Sit all forgetful of the roar Of wind and mountain stream;

 Forgot the wind, forgot the snow, What magic airs about them blow? They read, in wondering voices low, The Midsummer Night's Dream!

 And, reading, past their frozen hill In charmed woods they range at will And hear the horns of Oberon shrill Above the plunging Tam;--

 Yea, long beyond the cock's first crow In dreams they walk where windflowers blow; Late do they dream, and liker grow To Charles and Mary Lamb. 

HILLSBORO'S GOOD LUCK

When the news of Hillsboro's good fortune swept along the highroad therewas not a person in the other three villages of the valley who did notadmit that Hillsboro deserved it. Everyone said that in this caseProvidence had rewarded true merit, Providence being represented by Mr. Josiah Camden, king of the Chicago wheat pit, whose carelessly bestowedbounty meant the happy termination of Hillsboro's long and arduousstruggles. 

The memory of man could not go back to the time when that town had nothad a public library. It was the pride of the remote village, lost amongthe Green Mountains, that long before Carnegie ever left Scotland therehad been a collection of books free to all in the wing of DeaconBradlaugh's house. Then as now the feat was achieved by the united effortsof all inhabitants. They boasted that the town had never been taxed a centto keep up the library, that not a person had contributed a single pennyexcept of his own free will; and it was true that the public spirit of thevillage concentrated itself most harmoniously upon this favorite featureof their common life. Political strife might rage in the grocery-stores, religious differences flame high in the vestibule of the church, andsocial distinctions embitter the Ladies' Club, but the library was aneutral ground where all parties met, united by a common and disinterestedeffort. 

Like all disinterested and generous actions it brought its own reward. Thegreat social event of the year, not only for Hillsboro, but for all theoutlying towns of Woodville, Greenford, and Windfield, was the annual"Entertainment for buying new books, " as it was named on the handbillswhich were welcomed so eagerly by the snow-bound, monotony-riddeninhabitants of the Necronsett Valley. It usually "ran" three nights sothat every one could get there, the people from over Hemlock Mountaindriving twenty miles. There was no theater for forty miles, and many adweller on the Hemlock slopes had never seen a nearer approach to one thanthe town hall of Hillsboro on the great nights of the "Library Show. "

As for Hillsboro itself, the excitement of one effort was scarcely overbefore plans for the next year's were begun. Although the date was fixedby tradition on the three days after Candlemas (known as "Woodchuck Day"in the valley), they had often decided what the affair should be and hadbegun rehearsals before the leaves had turned in the autumn. There was nocorner of the great world of dramatic art they had not explored, borne upto the loftiest regions of endeavor by their touchingly unworldlyignorance of their limitations. As often happens in such cases theybelieved so ingenuously in their own capacities that their faith wroughtmiracles. 

Sometimes they gave a cantata, sometimes a nigger-minstrel show. The yearthe interior of the town hall was changed, they took advantage of the timebefore either the first or second floor was laid, and attempted andachieved an indoor circus. And the year that an orchestra conductor fromAlbany had to spend the winter in the mountains for his lungs, theypresented _Il Trovatore_. Everybody sang, as a matter of course, and thosewhose best efforts in this direction brought them no glory had theirinnings the year it was decided to give a play. 

They had done _East Lynne_ and _Hamlet, Uncle Tom's Cabin_ and _Macbeth_, and every once in a while the local literary man, who was also theundertaker, wrote a play based on local traditions. Of course they gave_The Village School_ and _Memory's Garland_, and if you don't rememberthose delectable home-made entertainments, so much the worse for you. Itis true that in the allegorical tableau at the end of _Memory's Garland_the wreath, which was of large artificial roses, had been made of suchgenerous proportions that when the Muses placed it on the head of slenderElnathan Pritchett, representing "The Poet, " it slipped over his ears, down over his narrow shoulders, and sliding rapidly toward the floor wasonly caught by him in time to hold it in place upon his stomach. Thathappened only on the first night, of course. The other performances it wasperfect, lodging on his ears with the greatest precision. 

It must not be supposed, however, that the responsibilities of Hillsborofor the library ended with the triumphant counting out of the money afterthe entertainment. This sum, the only actual cash ever handled by thecommittee, was exclusively devoted to the purchase of new books. It wasthe pride of the village that everything else was cared for without price, by their own enterprise, public spirit, and ingenuity. When the books, hadoverflowed the wing of Deacon Bradlaugh's house, back in 1869, they weregiven free lodging in the rooms of the then newly established andflourishing Post of the G. A. R. In 1896 they burst from this chrysalis intothe whole lower floor of the town hall, newly done over for the purpose. From their shelves here the books looked down benignly on church suppersand sociables, and even an occasional dance. It was the center of villagelife, the big, low-ceilinged room, its windows curtained with whitemuslin, its walls bright with fresh paper and colored pictures, like anysitting-room in a village home. The firewood was contributed, a loadapiece, by the farmers of the country about, and the oil for the lamps wasthe common gift of the three grocery-stores. There was no carpet, butbright-colored rag rugs lay about on the bare floor, and it was a point ofhonor with the Ladies' Aid Society of the church to keep these renewed. 

The expense of a librarian's salary was obviated by the expedient ofhaving no librarian. The ladies of Hillsboro took turns in presiding overthe librarian's table, each one's day coming about once in three weeks. "Library Day" was as fixed an institution in Hillsboro as "wash day, " andthere was not a busy housewife who did not look forward to the long quietmorning spent in dusting and caring for the worn old books, which werelike the faces of friends to her, familiar from childhood. The afternoonand evening were more animated, since the library had become a sort ofcommon meeting-ground. The big, cheerful, sunlighted room full ofgrown-ups and children, talking together, even laughing out loud at times, did not look like any sophisticated idea of a library, for Hillsboro wasas benighted on the subject of the need for silence in a reading-room ason all other up-to-date library theories. If you were so weak-nerved andsickly that the noise kept you from reading, you could take your book, gointo Elzaphan Hall's room and shut the door, or you could take your bookand go home, but you could not object to people being sociable. 

Elzaphan Hall was the janitor, and the town's only pauper. He was an oldG. A. R. Man who had come back from the war minus an arm and a foot, andotherwise so shattered that steady work was impossible. In order not towound him by making him feel that he was dependent on public charity, ithad been at once settled that he should keep the fire going in thelibrary, scrub the floor, and keep the room clean in return for his foodand lodging. He "boarded round" like the school-teacher, and slept in alittle room off the library. In the course of years he had grownpathetically and exasperatingly convinced of his own importance, but hehad been there so long that his dictatorial airs and humors were regardedwith the unsurprised tolerance granted to things of long standing, andwere forgiven in view of his devotion to the best interests of thelibrary, which took the place of a family to him. 

As for the expenses of cataloguing, no one ever thought of such a thing. Catalogue the books? Why, as soon hang up a list of the family so that youwouldn't forget how many children you had; as soon draw a plan of thevillage so that people should not lose their way about. Everybody knewwhat and where the books were, as well as they knew what and where thefields on their farms were, or where the dishes were on the pantryshelves. The money from the entertainment was in hand by the middle ofFebruary; by April the new books, usually about a hundred in number, hadarrived; and by June any wide-awake, intelligent resident of Hillsborowould have been ashamed to confess that he did not know the location ofevery one. 

The system of placing on the shelves was simplicity itself. Each year'snew acquisitions were kept together, regardless of subject, and located bythe name of the entertainment which had bought them. Thus, if you wishedto consult a certain book on geology, in which subject the library wasrich, owing to the scientific tastes of Squire Pritchett, you were told bythe librarian for the day, as she looked up from her darning with afriendly smile, that it was in the "Uncle Tom's Cabin section. " TheShakespeare set, honorably worn and dog's-eared, dated back to the unnamedmass coming from early days before things were so well systematized, andwas said to be in the "Old Times section"; whereas Ibsen (for some ofHillsboro young people go away to college) was bright and fresh in the"East Lynne section. "

The books were a visible and sincere symbol of Hillsboro's past andpresent. The honest, unpretending people had bought the books they wishedto read, and everyone's taste was represented, even a few French legendsand pious tales being present as a concession to the Roman Catholicelement among the French Canadians. There was a great deal of E. P. Roe, there was all of Mrs. Southworth--is it possible that anywhere else in theworld there is a complete collection of that lady's voluminousproductions?--but beside them stood the Elizabethan dramatists and atranslation of Dante. The men of the town, who after they were grown updid not care much for fiction, cast their votes for scientific treatiseson agriculture, forestry, and the like; and there was an informal historyclub, consisting of the postmaster, the doctor, and the druggist, who boredown heavily on history books. The school-teacher, the minister, and thepriest had each, ex officio, the choice of ten books with nobody toobject, and the children in school were allowed another ten with no advicefrom elders. 

It would have made a scientific librarian faint, the Hillsboro system, butthe result was that not a book was bought which did not find readers eagerto welcome it. A stranger would have turned dizzy trying to find his wayabout, but there are no strangers in Hillsboro. The arrival even of a newFrench-Canadian lumberman is a subject of endless discussion. 

It can be imagined, therefore, how electrified was the village by theapparition, on a bright June day, of an automobile creaking and wheezingits slow way to the old tavern. The irritated elderly gentleman whostepped out and began blaming the chauffeur for the delay announcedhimself to Zadok Foster, the tavern-keeper, as Josiah Camden, of Chicago, and was electrified in his turn by the calmness with which that mightyname was received. 

During the two days he waited in Hillsboro for the repair of his machinehe amused himself first by making sure of the incredible fact that nobodyin the village had ever heard of him, and second by learning with anastounded and insatiable curiosity all the details of life in thisforgotten corner of the mountains. It was newer and stranger to him thananything he had seen during his celebrated motor-car trip through theSoudan. He was stricken speechless by hearing that you could rent a wholehouse (of only five rooms, to be sure) and a garden for thirty-six dollarsa year, and that the wealthiest man in the place was supposed to haveinherited and accumulated the vast sum of ten thousand dollars. When heheard of the public library he inquired quickly how much it cost to run_that_? Mr. Camden knew from experience something about the cost of publiclibraries. 

"Not a cent, " said Zadok Foster proudly. 

Mr. Camden came from Chicago and not from Missouri, but the involuntaryexclamation of amazed incredulity which burst from his lips was, "Show_me_!"

So they showed him. The denizen of the great world entered the poor, low-ceilinged room, looked around at the dreadful chromos on the walls, atthe cheap, darned muslin curtains, at the gaudy rag rugs, at the shabby, worn books in inextricable confusion on the shelves, and listened withgleaming eyes to the account given by the librarian for the day of theyears of patient and uncomplaining struggles by which thesepoverty-stricken mountaineers had secured this meager result. He struckone hand into the other with a clap. "It's a chance in a million!" hecried aloud. 

When his momentous letter came back from Chicago, this was still therecurrent note, that nowadays it is so hard for a poor millionaire to finda deserving object for his gifts, that it is the rarest opportunitypossible when he really with his own eyes can make sure of placing hismoney where it will carry on a work already begun in the right spirit. Hespoke in such glowing terms of Hillsboro's pathetic endeavors to keeptheir poor little enterprise going, that Hillsboro, very unconsciousindeed of being pathetic, was bewildered. He said that owing to theunusual conditions he would break the usual rules governing hisbenefactions and ask no guarantee from the town. He begged, therefore, tohave the honor to announce that he had already dispatched an architect anda contractor to Hillsboro, who would look the ground over, and put up athoroughly modern library building with no expense spared to make itcomplete in equipment; that he had already placed to the credit of the"Hillsboro Camden Public Library" a sufficient sum to maintain inperpetuity a well-paid librarian, and to cover all expenses of fuel, lights, purchase of books, cataloguing, etc. ; and that the Library Schoolin Albany had already an order to select a perfectly well-balanced libraryof thirty thousand books to begin with. 

Reason recoils from any attempt to portray the excitement of Hillsboroafter this letter arrived. To say that it was as if a gold mine had beendiscovered under the village green is the feeblest of metaphors. For anentire week the town went to bed at night tired out with exclaiming, wokein the morning sure it had dreamed it all, rushed with a common impulse tothe post-office where the letter was posted on the wall, and fell toexclaiming again. 

Then the architect and contractor arrived, and Hillsboro drew back intoits shell of somber taciturnity, and acted, the contractor told thearchitect, as though they were in the habit of having libraries given themthree times a week regularly. 

The architect replied that these mountaineers were like Indians. You_couldn't_ throw a shock into them that would make them loosen up any. 

Indeed, this characterization seemed just enough, in view of the passiveway in which Hillsboro received what was done for it during the monthswhich followed. 

It was the passivity of stupefaction, however, as one marvel after anotherwas revealed to them. The first evening the architect sketched the plansof a picturesque building in the old Norse style, to match the romanticscenery of the lovely valley. The next morning he located it upon a knollcooled by a steady breeze. The contractor made hasty inquiries aboutlumber, labor, and houses for his men, found that none of these essentialswere at hand, decided to import everything from Albany; and by noon of theday after they arrived these two brisk young gentlemen had departed, leaving Hillsboro still incredulous of its good fortune. 

When they returned, ten days later, however, they brought solid andvisible proof in the shape of a trainload of building materials and acrowd of Italian laborers, who established themselves in a boarding-car ona sidetrack near the station. 

"We are going, " remarked the contractor to the architect, "to make thedirt fly. "

"We will make things hum, " answered the architect, "as they've neverhummed before in this benighted spot. "

And indeed, as up to this time they had never hummed at all, it is notsurprising that Hillsboro caught its breath as the work went forward likeAladdin's palace. The corner-stone was laid on the third of July and onthe first of October the building stood complete. By the first of Novemberthe books had come already catalogued by the Library School and arrangedin boxes so that they could be put at once upon the shelves; and the lastdetails of the interior decoration were complete. The architect was in themost naïve ecstasy of admiration for his own taste. The outside wasdeliciously unhackneyed in design, the only reproduction of a Norwegian_Stave-Kirke_ in America, he reported to Mr. Camden; and while that madethe interior a little dark, the quaint wooden building was exquisitely inharmony with the landscape. As for the interior it was a dream! Thereading-room was like the most beautiful drawing-room, an education initself, done in dark oak, with oriental rugs, mission furniture, andreproductions of old masters on the walls. Lace sash-curtains hung at thewindows, covered by rich draperies in oriental design, which subdued thelight to a delightful soberness. The lamps came from Tiffany's. 

When the young-lady librarian arrived from Albany and approvedenthusiastically of the stack-room and cataloguing, the architect's cup ofsatisfaction fairly ran over; and when he went away, leaving her installedin her handsome oak-finished office, he could hardly refrain fromembracing her, so exactly the right touch did she add to the whole thingwith her fresh white shirt-waist and pretty, business-like airs. There hadbeen no ceremony of opening, because Mr. Camden was so absorbed in anexciting wheat deal that he could not think of coming East, and indeed thewhole transaction had been almost blotted from his mind by a month'sflurried, unsteady market. So one day in November the pretty librarianwalked into her office, and the Hillsboro Camden Public Library was open. 

She was a very pretty librarian indeed, and she wore her tailor suits withan air which made the village girls look uneasily into their mirrors andmade the village boys look after her as she passed. She was moreover aspermeated with the missionary fervor instilled into her at the LibrarySchool as she was pretty, and she began at once to practice all the latestdevices for automatically turning a benighted community into the latestthing in culture. When Mrs. Bradlaugh, wife of the deacon, and presidentof the Ladies' Aid Society, was confined to the house with a cold, shesent over to the library, as was her wont in such cases, for someentertaining story to while away her tedious convalescence. Miss Martinsent back one of Henry James's novels, and was surprised that Mrs. Bradlaugh made no second attempt to use the library. When the little girlsin school asked for the Elsie books, she answered with a glow of pridethat the library did not possess one of those silly stories, and offeredas substitute, "Greek Myths for Children. "

Squire Pritchett came, in a great hurry, one morning, and asked for hisfavorite condensed handbook of geology, in order to identify a stone. Hewas told that it was entirely out of date and very incomplete, and thelibrary did not own it, and he was referred to the drawer in the cardcatalogue relating to geology. For a time his stubbed old fingers rambledamong the cards, with an ever-rising flood of baffled exasperation. Howcould he tell by looking at a strange name on a little piece of paperwhether the book it represented would tell him about a stone out of hisgravel-pit! Finally he appealed to the librarian, who proclaimed on alloccasions her eagerness to help inquirers, and she referred him to ahandsome great Encyclopedia of Geology in forty-seven volumes. He wanderedaround hopelessly in this for about an hour, and in the end retreatedunenlightened. Miss Martin tried to help him in his search, but, halfamused by his rustic ignorance, she asked him finally, with an air ofgentle patience, "how, if he didn't know _any_ of the scientific names, he expected to be able to look up a subject in an alphabetically arrangedbook?" Squire Pritchett never entered the library again. His son Elnathanmight be caught by her airs and graces, he said rudely enough in thepost-office, but he was "too old to be talked down to by a chit who didn'tknow granite from marble. "

When the schoolboys asked for "Nick Carter" she gave them those classics, "The Rollo Books"; and to the French-Canadians she gave, reasonablyenough, the acknowledged masters of their language, Voltaire, Balzac, andFlaubert, till the horrified priest forbade from the pulpit any of hissimple-minded flock to enter "that temple of sin, the public library. " Shehad little classes in art-criticism for the young ladies in town, explaining to them with sweet lucidity why the Botticellis and Rembrandtsand Dürers were better than the chromos which still hung on the walls ofthe old library, now cold and deserted except for church suppers andsociables. These were never held in the new reading-room, the orientalrugs being much too fine to have doughnut crumbs and coffee spilled onthem. After a time, however, the young ladies told her that they foundthemselves too busy getting the missionary barrels ready to continueabsorbing information about Botticelli's rhythm and Dürer's line. 

Miss Martin was not only pretty and competent, but she was firm ofpurpose, as was shown by her encounter with Elzaphan Hall, who haddomineered over two generations of amateur librarians. The old man hadreceived strict orders to preserve silence in the reading-room when thelibrarian could not be there, and yet one day she returned from thestack-room to find the place in a most shocking state of confusion. Everybody was laughing, Elzaphan himself most of all, and they did notstop when she brought her severe young face among them. Elzaphanexplained, waving his hand at a dark Rembrandt looking gloomily down uponthem, that Elnathan Pritchett had said that if _he_ had such a dirty faceas that he'd _wash_ it, if he had to go as far as from here to the EagleRock Spring to get the water! This seemed the dullest of bucolic wit toMiss Martin, and she chilled Elnathan to the marrow by her sad gaze ofdisappointment in him. Jennie Foster was very jealous of Miss Martin (aswere all the girls in town), and she rejoiced openly in Elnathan'switticism, continuing to laugh at intervals after the rest of the room hadcowered into silence under the librarian's eye. 

Miss Martin took the old janitor aside and told him sternly that if sucha thing happened again she would dismiss him; and when the old man, crazily trying to show his spirit, allowed a spelling-match to go on, fullblast, right in library hours, she did dismiss him, drawing on the endlessfunds at her disposal to import a young Irishman from Albany, who was soonplaying havoc with the pretty French-Canadian girls. Elzaphan Hall, stunned by the blow, fell into bad company and began to drink heavily, paying for his liquor by exceedingly comic and disrespectful imitations ofMiss Martin's talks on art. 

It was now about the middle of the winter, and the knoll which in June hadbeen the center of gratefully cool breezes was raked by piercing northwinds which penetrated the picturesquely unplastered, wood-finished wallsas though they had been paper. The steam-heating plant did not work verywell, and the new janitor, seeing fewer and fewer people come to thereading-room, spent less and less time in struggling with the boilers, orin keeping the long path up the hill shoveled clear of snow. Miss Martin, positively frightened by the ferocity with which winter flings itself uponthe high narrow valley, was helpless before the problem of the newconditions, and could think of nothing to do except to buy more fuel andyet more, and to beseech the elusive Celt, city-trained in plausibleexcuses for not doing his duty, to burn more wood. Once she remarkedplaintively to Elnathan Pritchett, as she sat beside him at a churchsupper (for she made a great point of "mingling with the people"), that itseemed to her there must be something the _matter_ with the wood inHillsboro. 

Everybody within earshot laughed, and the saying was repeated the next daywith shameless mirth as the best joke of the season. For the wood for thelibrary had had a history distinctly discreditable and as distinctlyludicrous, at which Hillsboro people laughed with a conscious lowering oftheir standards of honesty. The beginning had been an accident, but thelong sequence was not. For the first time in the history of the library, the farmer who brought the first load of wood presented a bill for thisservice. He charged two dollars a cord on the scrawled memorandum, butMiss Martin mistook this figure for a seven, corrected his total with thekindest tolerance for his faulty arithmetic, and gave the countryman acheck which reduced him for a time to a paralyzed silence. It was only ontelling the first person he met outside the library that the richness of agrown person knowing no more than that about the price of wood came overhim, and the two screamed with laughter over the lady's beautifully formedfigures on the dirty sheet of paper. 

Miss Martin took the hesitating awkwardness of the next man presentinghimself before her, not daring to ask the higher price and not willing totake the lower, for rustic bashfulness, and put him at his ease by sayingairily, "Five cords? That makes thirty-five dollars. I always pay sevendollars a cord. " After that, the procession of grinning men drivinglumber-sleds toward the library became incessant. The minister attemptedto remonstrate with the respectable men of his church for cheating a pooryoung lady, but they answered roughly that it wasn't her money butCamden's, who had tossed them the library as a man would toss a penny to abeggar, who had now quite forgotten about them, and, finally, who had madehis money none too honestly. 

Since he had become of so much importance to them they had looked up hissuccessful career in the Chicago wheat pit, and, undazzled by the millionsinvolved, had penetrated shrewdly to the significance of his operations. The record of his colossal and unpunished frauds had put to sleep, so faras he was concerned, their old minute honesty. It was considered the bestof satires that the man who had fooled all the West should be fooled inhis turn by a handful of forgotten mountaineers, that they should befleecing him in little things as he had fleeced Chicago in great. Therewas, however, an element which frowned on this shifting of standards, and, before long, neighbors and old friends were divided into cliques, callingeach other, respectively, cheats and hypocrites. Hillsboro was intolerablydull that winter because of the absence of the usual excitement over theentertainment, and in that stagnation all attention was directed to thenew joke on the wheat king. It was turned over and over, forward and back, and refurbished and made to do duty again and again, after the fashion ofrustic jokes. This one had the additional advantage of lining the pocketsof the perpetrators. They egged one another on to fresh inventions andvariations, until even the children, not to be left out, began to haveexploits of their own to tell. The grocers raised the price of kerosene, groaning all the time at the extortions of the oil trust, till theguileless guardian of Mr. Camden's funds was paying fifty cents a gallonfor it. The boys charged a quarter for every bouquet of pine-boughs theybrought to decorate the cold, empty reading-room. The washer-woman chargedfive dollars for "doing-up" the lace sash-curtains. As spring came on, andthe damages wrought by the winter winds must be repaired, the carpentersasked wages which made the sellers of firewood tear their hair at wastedopportunities. They might have raised the price per cord! The new janitor, hearing the talk about town, demanded a raise in salary and threatened toleave without warning if it were not granted. 

It was on the fifth of June, a year to a day after the arrival of Mr. Camden in his automobile, that Miss Martin yielded to this last extortion, and her action made the day as memorable as that of the year before. Thejanitor, carried away by his victory, celebrated his good fortune in somany glasses of hard cider that he was finally carried home and depositedlimply on the veranda of his boarding-house. Here he slept till the coldof dawn awoke him to a knowledge of his whereabouts, so inverted and tipsythat he rose, staggered to the library, cursing the intolerable length ofthese damn Vermont winters, and proceeded to build a roaring fire on thefloor of the reading-room. As the varnished wood of the beautiful fittingstook light like a well-constructed bonfire, realization of his act came tohim, and he ran down the valley road, screaming and giving the alarm atthe top of his lungs, and so passed out of Hillsboro forever. 

The village looked out of its windows, saw the wooden building blazinglike a great torch, hurried on its clothes and collected around the fire. No effort was made to save the library. People stood around in the chillymorning air, looking silently at the mountain of flame which burned asthough it would never stop. They thought of a great many things in thatsilent hour as the sun rose over Hemlock Mountain, and there were nosmiles or their faces. They are ignorant and narrow people in Hillsboro, but they have an inborn capacity unsparingly to look facts in the face. 

When the last beam had fallen in with a crash to the blackened cellar-holeMiss Martin, very pale and shaken, stepped bravely forward. "I know howterribly you must be feeling about this, " she began in her carefullymodulated voice, "but I want to assure you that I _know_ Mr. Camden willrebuild the library for you if--"

She was interrupted by the chief man of the town, Squire Pritchett, whobegan speaking with a sort of bellow only heard before in exciting momentsin town-meeting. "May I never live to see the day!" he shouted; and fromall the tongue-tied villagers there rose a murmur of relief at havingfound a voice. They pressed about him closely and drank in his dry, curtannouncement: "As selectman I shall write Mr. Camden, tell him of thefire, thank him for his kindness, and inform him that we don't want anymore of it" Everybody nodded. "I don't know whether his money is what theycall tainted or not, but there's one thing sure, it ain't done us anygood. " He passed his hand over his unshaven jaw with a rasping wipe andsmiled grimly as he concluded, "I'm no hand to stir up lawbreakin' anddisorder, but I want to say right here that I'll never inform against anyHillsboro man who keeps the next automobile out of town, if he has to takea ax to it!"

People laughed, and neighbors who had not spoken to one another since thequarrel over the price of wood fell into murmured, approving talk. 

Elnathan Pritchett, blushing and hesitating, twitched at his father'ssleeve. "But, father--Miss Martin--We're keeping her out of a position. "

That young lady made one more effort to reach these impenetrable people. "I was about to resign, " she said with dignity. "I am going to marry theassistant to the head of the Department of Bibliography at Albany. "

The only answer to this imposing announcement was a giggle from JennieFoster, to whose side Elnathan now fell back, silenced. 

People began to move away in little knots, talking as they went. ElzaphanHall stumped hastily down the street to the town hall and was standing inthe open door as the first group passed him. 

"Here, Mis' Foster, you're forgittin' somethin', " he said roughly, withhis old surly, dictatorial air. "This is your day to the library. "

Mrs. Foster hesitated, laughing at the old man's manner. 

"It seems foolish, but I don't know why _not_!" she said. "Jennie, you runon over home and bring a broom for Elzaphan. The book must be in an_awful_ state!"

When Jennie came back, a knot of women stood before the door, talking toher mother and looking back at the smoldering ruins. The girl followed thedirection of their eyes and of their thoughts. "I don't believe but whatwe can plant woodbine and things around it so that in a month's time youwon't know there's been anything there!" she said hopefully. 

SALEM HILLS TO ELLIS ISLAND

 A single sleighbell, tinkling down The virgin road that skirts the wood, Makes poignant to the lonely town Its silence and its solitude. 

 A single taper's feeble flare Makes darker by its lonely light The cold and empty farmsteads square That blackly loom to left and tight;

 And she who sews, by that dim flame, The patient quilt spread on her knees, Hears from her heirloom quilting-frame The frolic of forgotten bees. 

 Yea, all the dying village thrills With echoes of its cheerful past, The golden days of Salem Hills; Its only golden days? Its last?

II

 From Salem Hills a voiceless cry Along the darkened valley rolls. Hear it, great ship, and forward ply With thy rich freight of venturous souls. 

 Hear it, O thronging lower deck, Brave homestead-seekers come from far; And crowd the rail, and crane the neck; In Salem Hills your homesteads are!

 Where flourish now the brier and thorn, The barley and the wheat shall spring, And valleys standing thick with corn (Praise God, my heart!), shall laugh and sing. 

AVUNCULUS

I

The library of Middletown College had been founded, like the collegeitself, in 1818, and it was a firm article of undergraduate belief thatthe librarian, Mr. J. M. Atterworthy, had sat behind his battered deskfrom that date on to the present time. As a matter of fact, he was butjust gliding down-hill from middle age, having behind him the same numberof years as the active and high-spirited president of the college. And yetthere was ground for the undergraduate conviction that "Old J. M. " as hewas always called, was an institution whose beginnings dated back into themists of antiquity, for of his sixty years he had spent forty-four inMiddletown, and forty as librarian of the college. 

He had come down, a shy, lanky freshman of sixteen, from a little villagein the Green Mountains, and had found the only consolation for hishomesick soul in the reading-room of the library. During his sophomore andjunior years, there had sprung up in the bookish lad, shrinking from therough fun of his fellows, the first shoots of that passionate attachmentto the library which was later to bind him so irrevocably to the oldbuilding. In those early days there was no regular librarian, theprofessors taking turn and turn about in keeping the reading-room open fora few hours, three or four days a week. In his senior year, "J. M. " (evenat that time his real name was sunk in the initials, the significance ofwhich he jealously concealed) petitioned the faculty to be allowed to takecharge of the reading-room. They gave a shrug of surprise at hiseccentricity, investigated briefly his eminently sober-minded collegecareer, and heaved a sigh of relief as they granted his extraordinaryrequest. 

On the evening of Commencement day, J. M. Went to the president and madethe following statement: He said that his father and his mother had bothdied during his senior year, leaving him entirely alone in the world, witha small inheritance yielding about fifty dollars a month. He had noleaning to any profession, he shrank with all his being from the savagestruggles of the business world, and he could not bear to return toWoodville, to find himself lonely and bereaved in the spot where he hadhad such a cloudlessly happy childhood. In short, Middletown was the onlyplace he knew and liked, except Woodville, which he loved too poignantlyto live there with the soul gone out of things; and the library was theonly home he now had. If the president could get the trustees, at theirnext meeting, to allow him the use of the three rooms in the librarytower, and if they would vote him a small nominal salary, say thirtydollars a month, enough to make him a regular member of the college corps, he would like nothing better than to settle down and be the librarian ofhis _alma mater_ for the rest of his life. 

The president of that date was, like all the other presidents ofMiddletown College, a florid, hearty old gentleman with more red bloodthan he knew what to do with, in spite of his seventy years. He was vastlyamused at the inexperienced young fellow's simple-minded notion, and, clapping him on the shoulder, said with his cheerfully Johnsonianrotundity: "Why, my dear young sir, your recent sad bereavement must havetemporarily deranged your mental faculties, that at your age you cancontemplate adopting such a desiccated mode of existence. Yourproposition is, however, a highly advantageous one to your college, and Ishall see that it is accepted. However, I am willing to lay a wager withyou that a year will not be out before you are asking to be freed fromyour contract. "

J. M. , trembling in suspense, took in nothing of the president's speechbeyond the acceptance of his offer, and, pale with relief, he tried tostammer his thanks and his devotion to his chosen cause. He made noattempt to contradict the president's confident prophecies; he only madethe greatest possible haste to the tower-rooms which were to be his home. His eyes filled with thankfulness at his lot as he paced about them, and, looking out of the windows upon the campus, he had a prophetic vision ofhis future, of the simple, harmless, innocent life which was to be his. 

Of the two prophets he proved himself the truer. The head of his collegeand one generation after another of similar presidents laughed and jokedhim about the _Wanderlust_ which would some day sweep him away from hisold moorings, or the sensible girl who would some day get hold of him andmake a man of him. He outlasted all these wiseacres, however, watchingthrough mild, spectacled eyes the shifting changes of the college world, which always left him as immovable as the old elms before the librarydoor. He never went away from Middletown, except on the most necessarytrips to New York or Boston on business connected with book-buying for thelibrary. 

He explained this unheard-of stagnation by saying that the uttermetamorphosis of the village after the college life stopped gave himchange enough. Only once had he gone farther and, to one of the youngerprofessors who had acquired an odd taste for old J. M. 's society, confessed hesitatingly that he did not go away because he had no place towhich he could go, except to his childhood home. He said he couldn't bearto go there lest he find it so changed that the sight of it would rob himof his old memories, the dearest--in fact the only possessions of hisheart. After a pause he had added to his young listener, who found thelittle old secular monk a tremendously pathetic figure: "Do you know, Layton, I sometimes feel that I have missed a great deal in life--and yetnot at all what everybody thought I would miss, the stir of active life orthe vulgar excitement of being in love. All that kind of thing seems asdistasteful to me now as ever. "

There he stopped and poked the fire until the young professor, overcomewith sympathetic curiosity, urged him to go on. He sighed at this, andsaid: "Why, fortune ought not to have made me an only child, although Ican't say that I've ever longed for brothers or sisters. . . . But now I feelthat I should like very much to have some nephews and nieces. I nevercould have stood having children of my own--I should have been crushedunder the responsibility; but a nephew, now--a young creature with a brainand soul developing--to whom I could be a help . . . I find as I get olderthat I have an empty feeling as the college year draws to a close. I havekept myself so remote from human life, for fear of being dragged into thatfeverish center of it which has always so repelled me, that now I do nottouch it at all. " He ended with a gentle resignation, taking off hisglasses and rubbing them sadly: "I suppose I do not deserve anything more, because I was not willing to bear the burdens of common life . . . And yetit almost seems that there should be some place for such as I--?"

The heart of his young friend had melted within him at this revelation ofthe submissive isolation of the sweet-tempered, cool-blooded old scholar. Carelessly confident, like all the young, that any amount or variety ofhuman affection could be his for the asking, he promised himself to makethe dear old recluse a sharer in his own wealth; but the next year hemarried a handsome, ambitious girl who made him accept an advantageousoffer in the commercial world. With his disappearance, the solitary doorin the prison walls which kept J. M. Remote from his fellows swung shut. 

He looked so hopelessly dull and becalmed after this that the presidentwas moved to force on him a little outing. Stopping one day with histouring-car at the door of the library, he fairly swept the sedentarylittle man off his feet and out to the machine. J. M. Did not catch hisbreath during the swift flight to the president's summer home in a trim, green, elm-shaded village in the Berkshires. When he recovered a little hewas startled by the resemblance of the place to his old recollections ofWoodville. There were the same white houses with green shutters, and bigwhite pillars to the porches, the same green lawns and clumps of peoniesand carefully tended rose-gardens, and the same old-New-England air ofdistance from the hurry and smoky energy of modern commercial life. 

He spoke of this to the president's wife and she explained that it was nowonder. The village was virtually owned by a summer colony of oldishpeople who had lived there in their youth and who devoted themselves tokeeping the old place just as it had been. "We haven't any children tobother about any more, " she said, laughing, "so we take it out in puttingknockers on the doors instead of bells and in keeping the grocery-storesout of sight so that the looks of the village green shan't be spoiled. "

After J. M. Returned to deserted Middletown, he could not keep out of hismind the vision of the village he had just left, and the thought of thevillage like it which he had loved so well in his boyhood. It seemed tohim that if Woodville kept its old aspect at all, he would find it acomfort to try to inspire the people now living there to preserve theold-timey look of it, as the president was doing for his old home. Therewas positively a thrill for J. M. In the thought of his possiblyinfluencing other people, and before he knew it the plan had made itselfthe main interest of the interminably long, empty days of the summervacation. His vague feeling of a lack in his life crystallized about adefinite attempt at filling it. He was stirred from his inertia and, leaving word with the registrar of the college, a newcomer who was not atall surprised that the librarian should follow the example of all the restof the faculty, J. M. Made the three hours' journey which had separatedhim for so many years from the home of his youth. 

As the train wound along the valley beside the river, and as the familiaroutlines of the mountains rose up like the faces of dear, unforgottenfriends, J. M. Expanded and bloomed with delight in his new idea; but itwas a very shriveled and dusty little old scholar who finally arrived atthe farther end of the Main Street of Woodville and stood, in the hush ofthe noon hour, gazing back with a stricken face at the row of slovenlyunlovely front yards separating the wretched old houses from the street. 

He stood before the house that had been his home, and when he looked at ithe turned very pale and sat down quickly as though his knees had failedhim. Apparently the house had not been painted since his childhood, andcertainly it had not been repaired. Broken, dangling shutters gave it ablear-eyed look which it made him sick to see, and swarms of untidilypin-feathered chickens wandered about over the hard-beaten earth of theyard, which was without a spear of grass, littered with old boxes andcrates and unsightly rags, and hung with a flapping, many-legged wash. From the three rural mail-delivery boxes at the gate, he gathered thatthree families were crowded into the house which had seemed none too largefor his father, his mother, and himself. He put on his glasses and readthe names shudderingly--Jean-Baptiste Loyette, Patrick McCartey, and S. Petrofsky. 

"Good heavens!" he observed feebly to the vacant, dusty road beside him, and in answer a whistle from the big, barrack-like building at the otherend of the street screamed so stridently that the heavy August air seemedto vibrate about him in hot waves. 

At once, as if all the houses on the street were toy barometers, everydoor swung open and a stream of men and boys in dirty shirts and overallsflowed out through the squalid yards along the sidewalks toward thefactory. From the house before which the librarian of Middletown Collegesat in a crushed heap of resentment came three men to correspond to thethree mail-boxes: one short and red-haired; one dark, thick-set, andgrizzle-bearded; and the third tall, clumsily built, with an impassiveface and dark, smoldering eyes. They stared at the woebegone old strangerbefore their gate, but evidently had no time to lose, as their house wasthe last on the street, and hurried away toward the hideous, many-windowedfactory. 

J. M. Gazed after them, shaking his head droopingly, until a seconderuption from the house made him look back. The cause of the hard-beatenbare ground of the yard was apparent at once, even to his inexperiencedeyes. The old house seemed to be exuding children from a thousandpores--children red-haired and black-haired, and tow-headed, boys andgirls, little and big, and apparently yelling on a wager about who ownedthe loudest voice, all dirty-faced, barelegged, and scantily clothed. J. M. Mechanically set himself to counting them, but when he got as highas seventeen, he thought he must have counted some of them twice, and leftoff. 

A draggle-tailed woman stepped to a door and threw out a pan ofdish-water. J. M. Resolved to overcome his squeamish disgust and make afew inquiries before he fled back to the blessed cleanliness and quiet ofMiddletown Library. Picking his way gingerly through the chickens andpuppies and cats and children, the last now smitten into astonishedsilence by his appearance, he knocked on the door. The woman who came toanswer him was dressed in what had been a black and purple percale, wrapper, she had a baby on her arm, and was making vain attempts to fastenup a great coil of hair at the back of her head. No, she told him volubly, she couldn't remember the town when it was any different, though she andPat had lived there ever since they were married and came over fromIreland, and that was the whole of sixteen years ago. 

"Oh!" with a sudden gush of sympathy, "and so it was your old home! Isn'tthat interring now! You must come in and sit awhile. Pat, git a chair forthe gentleman, and Molly, take the baby so I can talk better. Oh, _won't_you come in? You'd _better_, now, and have a bite to eat and a sup of tea. I've some ready made. " Of course, she went on, she knew the house didn'tlook so nice as in his day. . . . "It's all along of the children! Irishpeople can't kape so tidy, now, _can_ they, with siven or eight, asYankees can with one--" But it certainly was a grand house, she didn'twonder he came back to look at it. Wasn't it fairly like a palace, now, compared with anything her kin back in Ireland had, and such a fine bigplace for the children to play an' all. 

J. M. Broke in to ask a final question, which she answered, making vainattempts to button her buttonless collar about a fat white neck, andfollowing him as he retreated toward the street, through a lively game ofbaseball among the older boys. No, so far as she knew there wasn't one ofthe Yankees left that had lived here in old times. They had gone away whenthe factory had come in, she'd heard said. J. M. Had expected this answer, but when it came, he turned a little sick for an instant, and felt giddywith the heat of the sun and lack of food and a desolation in his heartsharper and more searching than any emotion he had known since hisboyhood. Through a mist before his eyes, he saw his hostess make a wildwarning gesture, and heard a yell of dismay from the crowd of boys, butbefore he could turn his head, something cruelly hard struck him in theside. In the instant before he fell, his clearest impression was utteramazement that anything in the world could cause him such incredible pain, but then his head struck heavily against a stone, and he lay quite stillin a little crumpled heap under the old elm which had sheltered hisboyhood. 

II

For an instant after he opened his eyes again, all his life after leavingWoodville seemed to have melted away, for there at the foot of his bed wasthe little, many-paned window out of which he had watched the seasonschange all through his boyhood, and close above him hung the familiarslanting roof of his own little, old room. However, when he stirred, itwas not his mother but a rosy-faced Irish woman who stopped her sewing andasked him in a thick, sweet brogue if he needed anything. As he stared ather, recollecting but dimly having seen her glossy brown hair and fair, matronly face before, she exclaimed: "Ah, I'm Bridget McCartey, you know, an' you were hurted by the lads throwin' a baseball into your ribs. It'slyin' here a week sick you've been, and, savin' your pardon, the sooneryou tell me where your folks live the better. They'll be fair wild aboutyou. "

The sick man closed his eyes again. "I have no family at all, " he said. Itwas the first time in years that the thoroughgoing extent of that fact hadbeen brought home to him. 

His nurse was moved to sympathy over so awful a fate. "Sure an' don't Iknow how 'tis. Pat an' I left every one of our kith behind us, mostly, when we come away, and it's that hungry for thim that I get. I dare say itill becomes me to say it, but the first thing I says to myself when I seeyou was how like you are to one of my father's brothers in County Kerry. It's been a real comfort to have you here sick, as though I had some of myown kin near. _His_ name was Jerry. It's not possible, is't, that the J. On your handkerchief stands for Jerry, too?"

For the first time since he had left Woodville J. M. Disclosed thegrotesque secret of his initials. In the flaccid indifference ofconvalescence it flowed from him painlessly. "My name is JeroboamMordecai. "

"Exactly to a hair like Uncle Jerry's!" cried Mrs. McCartey, overjoyed bythe coincidence. "Except that his J. Stood for Jeremiah and his M. ForMichael. If you will tell me your last name, too, I'll try and lambastethe children into callin' you proper. Not havin' sorra name to speak ofyou by, and hearin' me say to Pat how you favored my father's brother, haven't they taken to callin' _you_ Uncle Jerry--more shame to them!"

The mention of the children awoke to life J. M. 's old punctilious habits. He tried to sit up. "But you have so little space for all your family--youshould not have taken me in; where can the children sleep?"

Mrs. McCartey pushed him back on the pillow with an affectionate firmnessborn of "the bringin' up of sivin. " "Now lay still, Uncle Jerry, and kapeyourself cool. " The name slipped out unnoticed in her hospitable fervor"Wasn't it the least we could do when 'twas our own Mike's ball that camenear killin' you? An' the children--the boys, that is, that this is theirroom--isn't it out in the barn they're sleepin' on the hay? An' thatpleased with it. Pat and I were thinkin' that now was a good chance toteach them to give up things--when you've no old folks about you, thechildren are so apt to grow up selfish-like--but they think the barn'sbetter nor the house, bless them, so don't _you_ worry. "

She pulled the bedclothes straight (J. M. Noticed that they were quiteclean), settled the pillow, and drew down the shade. "Now thin, you'vetalked enough, " she said. "Take a sup of sleep for a while. " And toJ. M. 's feeble surprise he found himself doing exactly as he was told, dozing off with a curious weak-headed feeling of comfort. 

He came to his strength slowly, the doctor forbidding him to think oftaking a journey for a month at least. Indeed, J. M. , thinking of hisisolated tower-rooms in the deserted college town, was in no haste toleave Mrs. McCartey's kindly, dictatorial care. He had been very sickindeed, the doctor told him seriously, and he felt it in the tremblingweakness of his first attempts at sitting up, and in the blank vacancy ofhis mind. 

At first he could not seem to remember for more than an instant at a timehow he came to be there, and later, as his capacity for thought came back, he found his surroundings grown insensibly familiar to him. He felthimself somehow to have slipped so completely into the inside of thingsthat it was impossible to recover the remote, hostile point of view whichhad been his as he had looked over the gate a fortnight ago. For instance, knowing now, not only that the children's faces were scrubbed to apolished redness every morning, but being: cognizant through his window ofmost of the palpably unavoidable accidents of play which made them dirtyhalf an hour later, he would have resented as unreasonable intolerance anyundue emphasis on this phase of their appearance. 

The first day that he was well enough to sit out on the porch was a greatevent. The children, who before had made only shy, fleeting visits to hisroom with "little handfuls of bokays, " as their mother said, were asexcited and elated over his appearance as though it reflected some crediton themselves. Indeed, J. M. Found that he was the subject ofunaccountable pride to all the family, and one of the first of thosedecisions of his between McCartey and Loyette occurred that very morning. The Loyette children insisted on being included in the rejoicing over theconvalescent's step forward, and soon Pierre, the oldest boy, was haledbefore J. M. Himself to account for his having dared to use the McCarteyname for the sick man. 

"You're _not_ his Uncle Jerry, _are_ you?" demanded Mike McCartey. 

J. M. Thought that now was the time to repress the too exuberant McCarteyfamiliarity. "I'm his Uncle Jerry just as much as I am yours!" he saidseverely. 

It took him a whole day to understand the jubilant triumph of theFrench-Canadians and to realize that he had apparently not only upheld theMcCarteys in their preposterous nickname, but that he had added all theblack-eyed Loyettes to his new family. Mrs. McCartey said to him thatevening, with an innocent misconception of the situation, "Sure an'mustn't it sound fine to you, that name, when you've no kith of your own. "J. M. Realized that that speech broke down the last bridge of retreat intohis forsaken dignity. It is worthy of note that as he lay in bed thatevening, meditating upon it, he suddenly broke into a little laugh ofutter amusement, such as the assistants at Middletown Library had neverheard from his lips. 

The rapidity with which he was fitted into the routine of the place tookhis breath away. At first when he sat on the porch, which was the commonground of all the families, either Mrs. McCartey or Mrs. Loyette sewednear him to keep an eye on the children, but, as his strength came back, they made him, with a sigh of relief, their substitute, and disappearedinto the house about neglected housework. "Oh, ain't it lovely now!" criedMrs. McCartey to Mrs. Loyette, "to have an old person of your own aboutthe place that you can leave the children with a half-minute, while yousnatch the wash-boiler off the fire or keep the baby from cuttin' herthroat with the butcher-knife. "

Mrs. Loyette agreed, shaking her sleek black head a great many times inemphasis. "Zose pipple, " she added, "zose lucky pipple who have all zereold pipple wiz zem, they can _not_ know how hard is eet to be a mozzer, wizout a one grand'mère, or oncle. "

So J. M. At the end of his first fortnight in Woodville found himselfundisputed umpire in all the games, discussions, quarrels, and undertakings of seven young, Irish-Americans and moreFrench-Canadian-Americans than he could count. He never did find outexactly how many Loyettes there were. The untidy front yard, littered withboxes and barrels, assumed a strangely different aspect to him as helearned its infinite possibilities, for games and buildings andimaginations generally. Sometimes it was a village with a box as house foreach child, ranged in streets and lanes, and then Uncle Jerry was themayor and had to make the laws. Sometimes the yard foamed and heaved insalt waves as, embarked in caravels, the expedition for the discovery ofAmerica (out of the older children's history-books) dashed over theAtlantic. It is needless to state that Uncle Jerry was ChristopherColumbus. 

Both the grateful mothers whom he was relieving cried out that never hadthere been such peace as since he came, not only because the childrencould appeal to him for decisions instead of running to their mothers, butbecause, the spectacular character in every game belonging to him as"company, " there were no more quarrels between Mike and Pierre about theleadership. J. M. Could not seem to find his old formal personality forweeks after Mike's baseball had knocked it out of him, and in the meantimehe submitted, meekly at first and later with an absurd readiness, to beingan Indian chieftain, and the head of the fire department, and theprincipal of a big public school, and the colonel of a regiment, and theowner of a cotton factory, and the leader of Arctic expeditions, and allthe other characters which the fertile minds inhabiting the front yardforced upon him. He realized that he was a changed soul when he foundhimself rejoicing as the boys came tugging yet another big crate, obtainedfrom the factory, to add to the collection before him. They needed it forthe car for the elephant as the circus they were then performing movedfrom one end of the yard to the other. 

He was often very, very tired when night came, but he surprised himself bynever having a touch of his old enemy, insomnia. At first he went to bedwhen the children did, but as he progressed out of convalescence, he satout on the porch with Pat and Bridget, as they insisted he should callthem. It was very quiet then, when the cool summer dusk had hushed all theyoung life which made each day such an absorbing series of unexpectedevents. The puppies and kittens slept in their boxes, the hens hadgathered the chickens under their wings, the children were sound asleep, and the great elms cast kindly shadows on the porch where the older peoplesat. The Loyettes often came out and joined them, and J. M. Listened withan interest which surprised him as they told stories about hard times intheir old homes, rejoiced in their present prosperity, and made humblyaspiring plans for their children. 

For the first time in his life J. M. Felt himself to be a person of almostunlimited resources, both of knowledge and wealth, as the pitifulmeagerness of his hosts supply of these commodities was revealed to him inthese talks, more intimate than any he had known, more vitally human thanany he had ever heard. The acquisition of rare first edition, perhaps themost stirring event in his life in Middletown, had never aroused him toanything like the eagerness with which he heard the Loyettes helplesslybemoaning their inability to do anything for their oldest child, Rosalie, a slim girl of seventeen. Her drawing-teacher at school had said that thechild had an unusual gift for designing, and a manufacturer of wallpaper, who had seen some of her work on a visit to the Woodville factory, hadconfirmed this judgment and said that "something ought to be done forher. "

"But _what?_" her parents wondered with an utter ignorance of the worldoutside of Woodville which astonished J. M. 

"Why don't you send her to a school of design?" he asked. 

"Vat is _zat_?" asked Papa Loyette blankly, and "We have no money, " sighedMaman. 

J. M. Stirred himself, wrote to the director of a school of design inAlbany, consulted the priest of the parish, sent some of Rosalie's work, and asked about scholarships. When a favorable answer came, he hurried toexplain the matter to the Loyettes and offered to provide the four dollarsa week necessary for her board at the Catholic Home for Working Girls, ofwhich the priest had told him. He went to bed that night with his heartbeating faster from the reflection of their agitated joy than it had donefor years. He could not get to sleep for a long time, such a thrill ofemotion did he get from each recollection of Maman Loyette's broad facebathed in tears of gratitude. 

After this they fell into the way of asking him about all their problems, from the management of difficult children to what to do about an unjustforeman and whether to join the union. The childless, unpractical, academic old bachelor, forced to meditate on these new subjects, gaveutterance to advice whose sagacity amazed himself. He had not known it wasin him to have such sensible ideas about how to interest a growing boy inathletics to keep him from drinking; and as for the question of unions, heboiled at the memory of some of the half-baked, pedantic theories he hadheard promulgated by the professor of political economy in Middletown. 

On the other hand, he stood in wonder at the unconscious but profoundwisdom which these ignorant people showed as to the fundamentals of life. 

"No, we're not much for _clothes!_" said Mrs. McCartey, comfortablytucking up her worn and faded sleeves. "Haven't we all of us enough goodclothes to go to Mass in, and that's a'plenty! The rest of Pat's moneygoes to gettin' lots of good food for the children, bless their red facesand fat little bellies! and laying by a dollar or so a week against therainy day. Children can play better, anyhow, with only overalls andshirts. The best times for kids is the cheapest!"

J. M. Thought of the heavy-eyed, harassed professors of his acquaintance, working nights and Sundays at hack work to satisfy the nervous ambitionsof their wives to keep up appearances, and gave a sudden swift embrace tothe ragged child on his lap, little Molly, who had developed an especialcult for him, following him everywhere with great pansy eyes of adoringadmiration. 

On his first expedition out of the yard since his illness, he was touchedby the enthusiastic interest which all Main Street took in his progress. Women with babies came down to nearly every gate to pass the time of daywith Rosalie, on whose arm he leaned, and to say in their varying foreignaccents that they were glad to see the sick gentleman able to be out. Since J. M. Had had a chance at first-hand observation of the variety ofoccupation forced upon the mother of seven, he was not surprised that theywore more or less dilapidated wrappers and did not Marcel-wave their hair. Now he noticed the motherly look in their eyes, and the exuberant healthof the children laughing and swarming about them. When he returned to thehouse he sat down on the porch to consider a number of new ideas whichwere springing up in his mind, beginning to return to its old vigor. Mrs. McCartey came out to see how he had stood the fatigue and said: "Sure youlook smarter than before you went! It inter_est_ed you now, didn't it, tohave a chance really to see the old place?"

"Yes, " said J. M. , "it did, very much. "

Mrs. McCartey went on: "I've been thinkin' so many times since you comehow much luckier you are than most Yankees that come back to their oldhomes. It must seem so good to you to see the houses just swarmin' withyoung life and to know that the trees and yards and rocks and brooks thatgive you such a good time when you was a boy, are goin' on givin' goodtimes to a string of other boys. "

J. M. Looked at her with attentive, surprised eyes. "Why, do you know, " hecried, "it _does_ seem good, to be sure!"

The other did not notice the oddness of his accent as she endedmeditatively: "You can never get me to believe that it don't make oldYankees feel low in their minds to go back to their old homes and findjust a few white-headed rheumatickers potterin' around, an' the grassgrowing over everything as though it was a molderin' graveyard that nobodyiver walked in, and sorra sign of life anyway you look up and down thestreet. "

J. M. 's mind flew back to the summer home of the president of Middletown. "Good gracious, " he exclaimed, "you're right!"

Mrs. McCartey did not take in to the full this compliment, her mind beingsuddenly diverted by the appearance of a tall figure at the door of thefarther wing of the house. "Say, Uncle Jerry, " she said, lowering hervoice, "Stefan Petrofsky asked me the other day if I thought you would lethim talk to you about Ivan some evening?"

"Why, who are they, anyhow?" asked J. M. "I've often wondered why theykept themselves so separate from the rest of us. " As he spoke he noticedthe turn of his phrase and almost laughed aloud. 

"Petrofsky's wife, poor thing, died since they come here, and now there'sonly Stefan, he's the father, and Ivan, he's the boy. He's awful smartthey say, and Stefan, he's about kilt himself to get the boy through thehigh school. He graduated this spring and now Stefan he says he wants himto get some _more_ education. He says their family, back in Russia, wasreal gentry and he wants Ivan to learn a lot so that he can help the poorRoosians who come here to do the right thing by the government--"

"_ What_?" asked J. M. "I don't seem to catch his idea. "

"Well, no more do I, sorra bit, " confessed Mrs. McCartey serenely. "Not abreath of what he meant got to me, but what he _said_ was that Ivan'sschoolin' had put queer ideas in his head to be an anarchist or somethin'and he thought that maybe more schoolin' would drive out _thim_ ideas andput in other ones yet. Hasn't it a foolish sound, now?" She appealed toJ . M. For a sympathy she did not get. 

"It sounds like the most interesting case I ever heard of, " he cried, witha generous looseness of superlative new to him. "Is Ivan that tall, shy, sad-looking boy who goes with his father to work?"

"That's _him_. An' plays the fiddle fit to tear the heart out of yourbody, and reads big books till God knows what hour in the mornin'. Hisfather, he says _he_ don't know what to do with him . . . There's a big, baddevil of a Polack down to the works that wants him to join the anarchistsin the fall and go to----"

J. M. Rose to his feet and hurried down the porch toward the Petrofskywing of the house, addressing himself to the tall, grave-faced figure inthe doorway. "Oh, Mr. Petrofsky, may I have a few minutes' talk with youabout your son?" he said. 

III

The registrar of Middletown College, being a newcomer, saw nothing unusualin the fact that the librarian came to his office on matriculation day toenroll as a freshman a shy, dark-eyed lad with a foreign name; but thepresident and older professors were petrified into speechlessness by thenews that old J. M. Had returned from parts unknown with a queer-lookingboy, who called the old man uncle. Their amazement rose to positiveincredulity when they heard that the fastidious, finical old bachelor hadactually installed a raw freshman in one of his precious tower-rooms, always before inexorably guarded from the mildest and most passingintrusion on their hallowed quiet. 

The president made all haste to call on J. M. And see the phenomenon withhis own eyes. As discreetly as his raging curiosity would allow him, hefell to questioning the former recluse. When he learned that J. M. Hadspent six weeks in Woodville, no more explanation seemed needed. "Oh, ofcourse, your old home?"

"Yes, " said J. M. , "my old home. "

"And you had a warm welcome there, I dare say?"

"Yes, indeed, " said J. M. 

"Found the old town in good condition?"

"Excellent!" this with emphasis. 

The president saw it all, explaining it competently to himself. "Yes, yes, I see it from here--vacation spent in renewing your youth playing with thechildren--promised to go back at Christmas, I suppose. "

"Oh, yes, of course, " said J. M. 

"Children cried when you came away, and gave you dotty little thingsthey'd made themselves?"

"Just like that, " with a reminiscent smile. 

"Well, well, " the president got to his feet. "Of course, most naturalthing in the world to take an interest in your brothers' and sisters'children. "

J. M. Did not contradict the president. He never contradicted thepresidents. He outlasted them so consistently that it was not necessary. This time he took off his glasses and rubbed them on an awkwardlyfashioned chamois spectacle-wiper made for him by little Molly McCartey. He noticed the pattern of the silk in his visitor's necktie and it madehim think of one of Rosalie Loyette's designs. He smiled a little. 

The president regarded this smiling silence with suspicion. He cocked hiseye penetratingly upon his librarian. "But it is very queer, J. M. , that aslong as I have known you, I never heard that you _had_ any family at all. "

J. M. Put his clean and polished spectacles back on his nose and lookedthrough them into the next room, where Ivan Petrofsky sat devouring hisfirst lesson in political economy. Then he turned, beaming like an amiablesphinx upon his interrogator. "Do you know--I never realized it myselfuntil just lately, " he said. 

BY ABANA AND PHARPAR

 Fields, green fields of Shining River, Lightly left too soon In the stormy equinoctial, In the hunter's moon, --

 Snow-blown fields of Shining River I shall once more tread; I shall walk their crested hollows, Living or dead. 

FINIS

To old Mrs. Prentiss, watching apprehensively each low mountain dawn, thelong, golden days of the warm autumn formed a series of blessed reprievesfrom the loom which hung over her. With her inherited and trained sense ofreality, she could not cheat herself into forgetting, even for a moment, that her fate was certain, but, nevertheless, she took a breathlessenjoyment in each day, as it passed and did not bring the dreaded changein her life. She spoke to her husband about this feeling as they sat onthe front step one October evening, when the air was as mild as in lateMay, breaking the calm silence, in which they usually sat, by saying, "Seems as though this weather was just made for us, don't it, father?"

The old man stirred uneasily in his chair. "I dun'no'--seems sometimes tome as though I'd ruther have winter come and be done with it. If we've gotto go as soon as cold weather sets in, we might as well go and have itover with. As 'tis, I keep on saying good-by in my mind to things andfolks every minute, and then get up in the morning to begin it all again. This afternoon I was down the river where I saved Hiram's life when he wasa little fellow--the old black whirl-hole. I got to thinking about thattime, I never was real sure till then I wouldn't be a coward if it comeright down _to_ it. Seems as though I'd been more of a man ever since. It's been a real comfort to me to look at that whirl-hole, and thatafternoon it come over me that after this there wouldn't be a single thingany more to remind us of anything _good_ or bad, we've ever done. It'll bemost as if we hadn't lived at all. I just felt as though I _couldn't_ goaway from everything and everybody I've ever known down to Hiram's stuffylittle flat. And yet I suppose we are real lucky to have such a good sonas Hiram now the others are all gone. I dun'no' what we'd do if 'tweren'tfor him. "

"Do!" cried his wife bitterly. "We could go on living right in this valleywhere we belong, if 'twas only in the poor-house!"

The old man answered reasonably, as though trying to convince himself, "Well, I suppose it's really flying in the face of Providence to feel so. The doctor says your lungs ain't strong enough to stand another of ourwinters in the mountains, fussing over stove fires, and zero weather andall, and I'm so ailing I probably wouldn't last through, either. He saysit's a special dispensation that we've got such a nice place to go wherethere's steam heat, and warm as summer, day and night. "

"Nathaniel!" exclaimed his wife, attempting to turn her bulky body towardhim in the energy of her protest, "how can you talk so! We've visitedHiram and we know what an awful place he lives in. I keep a-seeing thatlittle narrow room that's to be all the place you and I'll have, with theone window that gets flapped by the wash of the Lord knows who, and thatkitchen as big as the closet to my bedroom here, and that long narrowhall--why, it's as much as ever I can walk down that all without stickingfast--and Hiram's queer Dutch wife--"

She stopped, silenced by the scantiness of her vocabulary, but through hermind still whirled wordless outcries of rebellion. Her one brief visit tothe city rose before her with all the horror of the inexplicable, strange, and repellent life which it had revealed to her. The very conveniences ofthe compact city apartment were included in her revulsion from all that itmeant. The very kindnesses of the pretty, plump German woman who was herdaughter-in-law startled and repelled her, as did the familiar, easy, loud-voiced affection of the blond young German-Americans who were hergrandchildren. Even her own son, Hiram, become half Teutonic through theinfluence of his business and social relations among the Germans, seemedalien and remote to her. The stout, beer-drinking, good-natured andeasygoing man seemed another person from the shy, stiff lad who had goneaway from them many years ago, looking so like his father at nineteen thathis mother choked to see him. 

She passed in review all the small rooms of her son's home, "strung alongthe hall like buttons on a string, " and thought of the three flights ofstairs which were the only escape from them--three long, steep flights, which left her breathless, her knees trembling under her great weight, andwhich led out on the narrow side street, full of noisy, impertinentchildren and clattering traffic. Beyond that, nothing--a city full ofstrangers whose every thought and way of life were foreign to her, whosevery breath came in hurried, feverish gasps, who exhaled, as they passedher, an almost palpable emanation of hostile indifference to her and herexistence. It was no new vision to her. Ever since the doctor's verdicthad made it impossible longer to resist her son's dutiful urging of hisparents to make his home theirs she had spent scarcely an hour without asudden sick wave of dread of what lay before her; but the picture was thenone the less horrifying because of familiarity, and she struck her handstogether with a sharp indrawn breath. 

The gaunt old man turned toward her, a helpless sympathy twisting hisseamed and weather-marked face. "It's too _bad_, mother, " he said. "I knowjust how you feel about it. But Hiram's a good son, and"--he hesitated, casting about for a redeeming feature--"there's always the NaturalHistory Museum and the birds. "

"That's just it, Nathaniel, " returned the old rebel against fate. "Youhave something there that's going on with _one_ thing you've done here. You've always noticed birds and studied 'em in the woods, and you can goon doing it in a museum. But there ain't a thing for me! All I've everdone is to live right here in this house ever since I was born, and lookout at the mountains and the big meadows and the river and the churchyard, and keep house and take care of you and the children. 

"Now the children are all gone, and I haven't the strength to take care ofyou the way you need; my life is all done--there ain't no more to it!

"It's like a book--there's still a chapter _you_ can write, or one you canfinish up; but me--I've come right down to _Finis_, only the Lord won'twrite it for me. It's as if somebody wanted to scrawl on the back flyleafsomething that hasn't a thing to do with the rest of the book, somescratching stuff in a furrin' language that I can't even understand. "

Her husband did not contradict her. He sighed heavily and they both fellagain into a cheerless silence. The moon rose with a strange, eerieswiftness over the wall of mountain before them, and its waveringreflection sprang at once to life in the swirling waters of the black holein the Necronsett on the other side of the meadow. The old woman's heartgave a painful leap in her breast at the sight. It was probably one of thelast times she would see it. Numberless occasions when she had noted itbefore hurried through her mind. 

She felt herself again the little girl who had sat in summer evenings, miles away from the talk of her elders in a happy child's reverie, and whohad grown dizzy with watching the swimming reflection in the whirlpool. She had a strange fleeting hallucination that she was again sitting in themoonlight, her cheeks flushed and her strong young pulse beating high tohear Nathaniel's footfall draw nearer down the road. She felt again thewarm, soft weight of her little son, the first-born, the one who had diedyoung, as she remembered how proud she and Nathaniel had been when hefirst noticed the moon. 

An odd passion of recollection possessed her. As the moon rose higher sheseemed to be living over at one time a thousand hours of her busy, ardentlife. She looked at the high, drooping line of the mountains with herchildhood's delight in its clear outline against the sky; she saw thewhite stones of the old graveyard, next door, glimmer through the shadowcast by the church tower, with the half uneasy, fearful pleasure of herromantic girlhood; she felt about her the solidity and permanency of theold house, her father's and her grandfather's home, with the joy inprotected security of her young married life; and through it all there rana heavy sick realization that she was, in fact, a helpless old woman, grown too feeble to conduct her own life, and who was to be forced to dietwo deaths, one of the spirit and one of the body. 

"Come, mother, " said Nathaniel, rising, "we'd better go to bed. We both ofus get notiony sitting here in the moonlight. "

He helped her raise her weighty body with the deftness of long practiceand they both went dully into the house. 

The knowledge of the sky and of the signs of weather which was almost aninstinct with the descendant of generations of farmers, was put to ananxious use during the days which followed. 

Not since the days when, as a young girl, she had roamed the mountains, asmuch a part of the forest and fields as any wild inhabitant, had she soscanned the face of the valley which was her world. 

She had stopped hoping for any release from her sentence. She only prayednow for one more day of grace, and into each day she crowded a fullness oflife which was like a renewal of her vigorous youth. 

Of late years, existence had flowed so uniform a passage through thechannels of habit that it had become but half sentient. The two old peoplehad lived in almost as harmoniously vacant and vital a silence as the oldtrees in the forest back of the house. In the surroundings whichgenerations of human use had worn to an exquisite fitness for their needs, and to which a long lifetime had adjusted their every action, theyconvicted their life with the unthinking sureness of a process of Nature. But now the old woman, feeling exile close upon her, drew from everymoment of the familiar life an essential savor. 

She knew there was no hope for her; the repeated visits of the doctor andhis decided judgments left her no illusions as to the possibility ofescape. "The very first cold snap you must certainly go, " he said, withthe inflexibility of the young. "Mr. Prentiss is likely to have one of hisbad turns and you simply cannot give him the are he must have. Besides, when he is sick, you will have to look after the fires, and the slightestexposure would mean pneumonia. I've just written your son so. " He drew onhis overcoat. He was so recently from the hospital that it was still of afashionable cut and texture. "_I_ can't see anyway why you object togoing. Your son can't afford to keep you both here, and hire somebody tolook after you into the bargain. Think of the advantages you have there, theaters and museums and the like. "

Mrs. Prentiss spoke sharply. "I've never been in a theater in my life andI hope I'll go to my grave without being; and as for museums and things, look at me! I'm so big I can hardly get into the cars, and my citygrandchildren are ashamed to go out with me and have all the folks lookingat the fat old woman from the country. "

The doctor laughed involuntarily at this picture as he turned away. 

"Do you think you are so big it takes the whole Necronsett valley to holdyou?" he called lightly over his shoulder. 

Mrs. Prentiss looked after him with burning eyes What did _he_ know aboutthe continuity of human life He had told her himself that he had neverlived more than four years in one place. What did he know of ordering yourlife, not only for yourself, but for your parents and grandparents? Shefelt often as she looked upon the unchanging line of the mountainsguarding the valley, as in her great-grandfather's time, that she saw withthe eyes of her ancestors as well as her own. The room in which she stoodhad been her grandmother's bedroom, and her father had been born there, asshe had been herself, and as her children had been. In her childhood shehad looked up to the top of the tall chest of drawers as to a mountainpeak, and her children had, after her. Every inequality in the floor wasas familiar to her feet as to those of her great-grandmother. The bigchest, where she had always kept her children's clothes, had guarded hersand her mother's, and as often as she had knelt by it, she had so vivid arecollection of seeing her mother and her grandmother in the sameattitude, that she seemed to lose for a moment the small and confiningsense of individual personality, and to become merged in a nobleprocession of mothers of the race. 

She had been an undisciplined girl, called a tomboy in those days, whosefarmer forbears had given to her a pagan passion for the soil and the opensky. Although brought up with a rigid training in theology, religion hadnever meant more to her than a certainty of hell as a punishment formisdeeds which neither she nor any of the valley people were likely tocommit--murder, suicide, false swearing, and the like. Of definitereligious feeling, she had none, although the discipline of a hard ifhappy life had brought her spiritual life in an unconsciously profoundform. She had shrunk from that discipline with all the force of hernature, and in her girl's heart had vowed that she would never marry andlead the slave's life of a New England farmer's wife. But then had arrivedNathaniel, the big, handsome lad who had taken her wild, shy heart andlost his own when they first met. 

So, half rebellious, she had begun the life of a wife in the old housefrom which her mother had just gone to the churchyard next door, and whichwas yet filled with her brave and gentle spirit. The old woman, lookingmiserably about her, remembered how at every crisis of her life the oldhouse had spoken to her of the line of submissive wives and mothers whichlay back of her, and had tamed her to a happy resignation in the commonfate of women. On her mother's bed she had borne the agony of childbirthwithout a murmur, she whose strong young body had never known pain of anykind. She had been a joyful prisoner to her little children, she who hadalways roamed so foot-free in her girlhood, and with a patience inspiredby the thought of her place in the pilgrimage of her race, she had turnedthe great strength of her love for her husband toward a contentedacceptance of the narrow life which was all he could give her. 

Each smallest detail in the room had a significance running back overyears. The ragged cuts in the window-sill moved her to a suddenrecollection of how naughty little Hiram had cut them with his firstknife. With what a repressed intensity she had loved the child while shehad reproved him! How could she go away and leave every reminder of herchildren! With a quick and characteristic turn she caught herself in theflagrant contradiction involved in her reluctance to leave behind her meresenseless reminders of her son when she was going to his actual self. Andthen, with the despairing clear sight of one in a crisis of life, she knewthat, in very fact, Hiram was no longer the boy who had left them yearsago. Away from all that made up her life, under influences utterly foreignand alien, he had spent almost twice as many years as he had with her. Notonly had the reaction from his severe training carried him to anotherextreme of laxness, but as result of his continued absence he had lost allcontact with her world. He no longer consciously repudiated it, he hadcrossed the deeper gulf of forgetting it. He was a stranger to her. 

Always before the memories which clung about every corner of the dark oldhouse had helped her, but now she was forced to face a crisis which noneof her people had known. It was not one of the hardships of life whichwere to be accepted, and the hot rebellion of her girlhood burned in heraching old heart. She thought resentfully of the doctor's blind and stonylack of understanding. His last ironic sentence came to her mind and sheflamed at the recollection. Yes, it did take the whole valley to hold her, the valley which was as much a part of her as her eyes which beheld it. There were moments when she stood under the hazy autumn sky, so acutelyconscious of every line and color of the great wall of mountainssurrounding her that she grew in very fact to be an indivisible portion ofthe whole--felt herself as actually rooted to that soil and as permanentunder that sky as the great elm before the door. 

She made no more outcries against fate to her husband, partly because ofthe anguish which came upon his gentle old face at the sight of hersuffering, and partly because she felt herself to have no tangible reasonfor rebellion. During the last years they had gone drearily around andaround the circle which they felt closing so inexorably upon them, andthere was no longer any use to wear themselves out in futile discussionsof impossible plans. They had both been trained to regard reasonablenessas one of the cardinal virtues, and to the mild nature of the old man itwas a natural one, so they tried conscientiously to force themselves notonly to act, but to feel, "like sensible folks, " as they put it bravely tothemselves. 

"Other folks have gone to live with their children, and not near such goodsons as Hiram either, and they didn't make such a fuss about it, " said Mr. Prentiss one evening, out of a long silence, as they sat in front of thehearth. He looked at his wife, hoping for a cheerful response, but herlips were set in a quivering line of pain, and the flickering light showedher fair broad face glistening with tears. "Oh, _mother_!" he cried, in ahelpless misery of sympathy. "Oh, mother, don't! I can't stand it! If Icould only do it for you! But we _can't_ stay, you know. "

The other nodded dumbly, although after a moment she said, "Every day Ilive all my life over again, and my mother's, and all my folks. It hasnever seemed as though they really died as long as we lived here same asthey did. It's like killing them all again to go away and sell the houseto strangers. "

There was a silence and then, "Oh, Nathaniel, what was that?" she cried, her voice rising in a quaver of apprehension. 

"The wind, " said her husband, stirring the fire. 

"I know. But _what_ wind? It sounds like the first beginning of the windover Eagle Rock, and that means snow!"

She hastened heavily to the window, and raised the shade. "There's a ringaround the moon as plain as my wedding ring!" And then as she looked thereclung to the window-pane a single flake of snow, showing ghastly white inthe instant before it melted. 

"Nathaniel, the end has come, " she said solemnly. "Help me get to bed. "

The next morning there was a foot of snow and the thermometer was goingsteadily down. When the doctor arrived, red-nosed and gasping from theknife-like thrusts of the wind over Eagle Rock, he announced that it wasonly eight above zero, and he brought a kindly telegram from Hiram, sayingthat he had started for the mountains to accompany his parents back to thecity. "I envy you!" said the doctor, blowing on his stiff fingers. "Thinkof the bliss of being where you have only to turn a screw in yoursteam-radiator to escape from this beastly cold. Your son will be here onthe evening train, and I'll bring him right over. You'll be ready to starttomorrow, won't you? You've had all the autumn to get packed up in. "

Mrs. Prentiss did not answer. She was so irrationally angry with him thatshe could not trust herself to speak. She stood looking out of the lowwindow at the Necronsett, running swift and black between the white banks. She felt a wave of her old obsession that in her still lived the bygonedwellers in the old house, that through her eyes they still saw theinfinitely dear and familiar scenes, something in her own attitudereminded her of how her father had looked as he stood every morning atthat same window and speculated on the weather. For a moment she had analmost dizzy conviction that he did in all reality stand there again. 

Then she heard the doctor saying, "I'm coming over there myself when youstart for the station, to see that you're well wrapped up. The leastexposure----" He looked at Mrs. Prentiss's broad and obstinate back, turned, to her husband, and tapped his chest significantly. 

After he had gone the room was intensely quiet. Mr. Prentiss sat by thefire, looking vacantly at his withered old hands on his knees, and hiswife did not stir from the window. Her heavy, wide figure was immovable, but a veritable whirlwind of despair raged within her. She had supposedshe knew all along how bad it was going to be, but it had been a foolishchild's play, like shutting your eyes to pretend you were blind. Now thatutter darkness was upon her, it was as great a shock as though it camewith the most extreme and cruel surprise. A thousand furious fancies wentthrough her mind, although she continued to gaze out of the window withthe same blank look of stunned incredulity. The whirlpool in the rivercaught her eye and she had a wild impulse to throw herself into it. Evenin her frenzy, however, there came the thought, instantly dissuading, ofthe scandal in the village and family which such an action would cause. 

No, there was no escape at all, since that simple and obvious one wasclosed. 

The valley lay about her, the mountain walls iridescent with snow insunshine, the river gleaming with its curious, rapid, serpentine life, inall the peaceful death of winter; everything was as it always had been. Her mind refused to accept the possibility of her living under otherconditions with as irresistible and final a certainty as if she had beencalled upon to believe she could live with her head separated from herbody. 

And yet, battering at that instinctive feeling, came the knowledge thatshe was to start for New York the next day. She felt suddenly that shecould not. "I can't! I can't!" she cried dumbly. "I can't, even if I_have_ to!"

An instant later, like an echo, a fiercer gust than usual swept down offthe ledge of rock above the little house, rattled the loose old window, and sent a sharp blade of icy air full in the old woman's eyes. She gaspedand started back. And then, all in a breath, her face grew calm andsmooth, and her eyes bright with a sudden resolve. Without a moment'shesitation, she turned to her husband and said in a tone more like her oldself than he had heard for some time, "Father, I wish you'd go over toMrs. Warner's and take back that pattern. If we're going to leaveto-morrow, you know----"

The old man rose obediently, and began putting on his wraps. His wifehelped him, and hurried him eagerly off. When she was alone, she tore atthe fastening of her gown in a fury of haste, baring her wrinkled oldthroat widely. Then without a glance about her, she opened the door to thewoodshed, stepped out, and closed it behind her. The cold clutched at herthroat like a palpable hand of ice, and her first involuntary gasp set herinto a fit of coughing. 

She sat down on the stump where kindlings were always split and opened hergown wider. She noticed how fair and smooth the skin on her shouldersstill was and remembered that her husband had always been proud of herpretty neck. She had worn a low-necked dress when he had told her he lovedher. That had been in the garden, into which she could now look as she saton the stump. She had been picking currants for tea, and he had gone outto see her. The scene came up before her so vividly that she heard hisvoice, and felt herself turn to him with the light grace of her girlhoodand cry again, in an ecstasy of surprised joy, "Oh, _Nathaniel!_"

A gust of wind whirled a handful of snow against her and some of itsettled on her bare shoulders. She watched it melt and felt the icy littletrickle with a curious aloofness. Suddenly she began to shiver, gripped bya dreadful chill, which shook her like a strong hand. After that she wasvery still again, the death-like cold penetrating deeper and deeper untilher breath came in constricted gasps. She did not stir until she heard thefront door bang to her husband's return. Then she rose with infiniteeffort and struggled back into the kitchen. When he came in, she wasstanding by the sink, fumbling idly with the dishes. Already her head waswhirling, and she scarcely knew what she was doing. 

In the nightmare of horror which his wife's sudden sickness brought uponhim, old Mr. Prentiss felt that he could bear everything except the sightand sound of his wife's struggles for breath. He hardly saw the neighborwomen who filled the house, taking advantage of this opportunity toinspect the furniture with an eye to the auction which would follow theremoval of the old people to the city. He hardly heeded the doctor'sdesperate attempts with all varieties of new-fangled scientificcontrivances to stay the hand of death. He hardly knew that his son hadcome, and in his competent, prosperous way was managing everything forhim. He sat in one corner of the sick-room, and agonized over theunconscious sick woman, fighting for every breath. 

On the third day he was left alone with her, by some chance, and suddenlythe dreadful, heaving gasp was still. He sprang to the bedside, sick withapprehension, but his wife looked up at him with recognition in her eyes. "This is the end, Nathaniel, " she said in so low a whisper that he laidhis ear to her lips to hear. "Don't let anybody in till I'm gone. I don'twant 'em to see how happy I look. " Her face wore, indeed, an unearthlylook of beatitude. 

"Nathaniel, " she went on, "I hope there's no life after this--for _me_anyway. I don't think I ever had very much soul. It was always enough forme to live in the valley with you. When I go back into the ground I'll bewhere I belong. I ain't fit for heaven, and, anyway, I'm tired. We'velived hard, you and I, Nathaniel; we loved hard when we were young, andwe've lived all our lives right out to the end. Now I want to rest. "

The old man sat down heavily in a chair by the bed. His lips quivered, buthe said nothing. His wife's brief respite from pain had passed as suddenlyas it came, and her huge frame began again to shake in the agony ofstraining breath. She managed to speak between gasps. 

"Don't let a soul in here, Nathaniel. I'll be gone in a few minutes. I don't want 'em to see----"

The old man stepped to the door and locked it. As he came back, the sickwoman motioned him to come closer. 

"Natty, I thought I could keep it, but I never did have a secret from you, and I can't die without telling you, if there _is_ a heaven andhell----Oh, Natty, I've done a wicked thing and I'm dying withoutrepenting. I'd do it again. That time you went to Mrs. Warner's with thepattern--this cold I got that day I went out----"

Her husband interrupted her. For the first time in years he did not callher "mother, " but used the pet name of their courtship. The long years oftheir parenthood had vanished. They had gone back to the days when eachhad made up all the world to the other. "I know, Matey, " he said. "I metyoung Warner out in the road and give the pattern to him, and I come rightback, and see you sitting out there. I knew what 'twas for. "

His wife stared at him, amazement silencing her. 

"I thought it was the only thing left I could do for you, Matey, to letyou stay there. You know I never wished for anything but that you shouldhave what you wanted. " He had spoken in a steady, even tone, which nowbroke into an irrepressible wail of selfish, human anguish. "But you leaveme all _alone_, Matey! How can I get on without you! I thought I'd diemyself as I sat inside the house watching you. You're all I ever had, Matey! All there has ever been in the world for me!"

The old woman stopped her gasping by a superhuman effort. "Why, Natty, Inever supposed you thought so much of me still. I thought that had gonewhen we got old. But, oh, my dear! I'm afraid I've dragged you down withme to destruction. It wa'n't any matter about me, but I'm afraid you'velost your soul. That was a wicked thing for us to do!"

Her husband lifted his tear-stained, old face and laid it on the pillowbeside her. He did not put his arms about her, as a younger lover or oneof another country might have done, but because he was a man who had loveddeeply all his life, his answer came with the solemn significance andsincerity of a speech before the Judgment Seat. "I ain't afraid of hell ifyou're there, Matey, " he said. 

His wife turned her head and looked at him, her whole face transfigured. She was no longer a fat old woman on her deathbed. Before his very eyesshe grew again to be the girl among the currant bushes, and with the sameamazed intonation of incredulous joy she cried his name aloud. "Oh, Nathaniel!" she said, and with the word the longed for _Finis_ was writtento her life. 

A VILLAGE MUNCHAUSEN

I

When I was a little girl, and lived in Hillsboro with my grandparents, there were two Decoration Days in every year. One was when all weschool-children took flowers put to the cemetery and decorated the gravesof the soldiers; and the other was when the peonies and syringas bloomed, and grandfather and I went alone to put a bouquet on the grave of oldJedediah Chillingworth. 

Grandfather did this as a sort of penance for a great mistake he had made, and I think it was with the idea of making an atonement by confession thathe used always to tell me the story of his relations with the old man. Atany rate, he started his narrative when we left the house and began towalk out to the cemetery, and ended it as he laid the flowers on theneglected grave. I trotted along beside him, faster and faster as he grewmore and more interested, and then stood breathless on the other side ofthe grave as he finished, in his cracked old voice, harsh with emotion. 

The first part of his story happened a very long time ago, even beforegrandfather was born, when Jedediah Chillingworth first began to win forhimself the combination title of town-fool and town-liar. By the timegrandfather was a half-grown boy, big enough to join in the rough crowd ofvillage lads who tormented Jed, the old dizzard had been for years thelocal butt. Of course I never saw him, but I have keard so much about himfrom all the gossips in the village, and grandfather used to describe himso vividly, that I feel as if I know all about him. 

For about ten years of his youth Jedediah had been way from our littleVermont town, wandering in the great world. From his stories, he had beeneverywhere on he map. In the evening, around the stove in the villagepost-office, when somebody read aloud from the newspaper a remarkableevent, all the loafers turned to Jed with wide, malicious grins, to hearhim cap it with a yet ore marvelous tale of what had happened to him. Theygathered around the simple-minded little old man, their tongues in theircheeks, and drew from him one silly, impossible, boastful story afteranother. They made him amplify circumstantially by clumsily artfulquestions, and poked one another in the ribs with delight over his deludedjoy in their sympathetic interest. 

As he grew older, his yarns solidified like folk-lore, into a consecratedand legendary form, which he repeated endlessly without variation. Therewere many of them--"How I drove a team of four horses over a fallingbridge, " "How I interviewed the King of Portugal, " "How I saved big SamHarden's life in the forest fire. " But the favorite one was, "How I rodethe moose into Kennettown, Massachusetts. " This was the particularflaunting, sumptuous yarn which everybody made old Jed bring out forcompany. If a stranger remarked, "Old man Chillingworth can tell a tale ortwo, can't he?" everybody started up eagerly with the cry: "Oh, but haveyou heard him tell the story of how he rode the moose into Kennettown, Massachusetts?"

If the answer was negative; all business was laid aside until the witheredlittle old man was found, pottering bout some of the odd jobs by which heearned his living. He was always as pleased as Punch to be asked toperform, and laid aside his tools with a foolish, bragging grin on hisface, of which grandfather has told me so many times that it seems as if Ihad really seen it. 

This is how he told the story, always word for word the same way:

"Wa'al, sir, I've had queer things happen to me in my time, hain't I, boys?"--at which the surrounding crowd always wagged mocking heads--"butnothin' to beat that. When I was ashore wunst, from one of my long v'y'geson the sea, I was to Kennettown, Massachusetts. "

"How'd ye come to go there, Jed?" This was a question never to be omitted. 

"Oh, I had a great sight of money to take to some folks that lived there. The captain of our ship had died at sea, and he give me nine thousand fivehundred and seventy-two English gold guineas, to take to his brother andsister. "

Here he always stared around at the company, and accepted credulously thecounterfeit coin of grotesquely exaggerated amazement which was given him. 

"Wa'al, sir, I done it. I give the gold to them as it belonged to, and Iwas to leave town on the noon stagecoach. I was stayin' in the captain'sbrother's house. It was spang up against the woods, on the edge of town;and, I tell ye, woods _was_ woods in them days. 

"The mornin' I was to leave I was up early, lookin' out of my window, whenwhat should I see with these mortial eyes but a gre't bull moose, as bigas two yoke o' oxen, comin' along toward the house. He sort o' staggeredalong, and then give a gre't sigh I could hear from my room--I was on theground floor--fell down on his knees, and laid his head on the ground 'sif he was too beat out to go another step. Wa'al, sir, I never waited notlong enough even to fetch a holler to wake the folks I just dove out o'the window, and made for him as fast as I could lick in. As I went by thewood-pile, I grabbed up a big stick of wood----"

"What kind of wood?" everybody asked in chorus. 

"'Twas a big stick of birch-wood, with the white bark on it as clean aswritin'-paper. I grabbed that up for a club--'twas the only thing insight--and when I got to the moose I hit him a clip on the side of thehead as hard as I could lay on. He didn't so much as open an eye, but Isaw he was still breathing and I climbed up on his back so's to get a goodwhack at the top of his head. And then, sir, by Jupiter! he riz right uplike a earthquake under me, and started off at forty miles an hour. Hethrowed his head back as he run, and ketched me right between his horns, like a nut in a nutcracker. I couldn't have got out of them horns--no, sir, a charge of powder couldn't scarcely have loosened me. "

There was another pause at this place for the outcries of astonishment andmarvel which were never lacking. Then Jed went on, mumbling his toothlessgums in delight over his importance. 

"Wa'al, sir, I dassent tell ye how long we careered around them woods andpastures, for, after a while, he got so plumb crazy that he run right outinto the open country. I'd hit him a whack over the head with my stick ofwood every chanst I got and he was awful weak anyhow, so he'd kind o'stagger whenever he made a sharp turn. By an' by we got to goin' towardtown. Somehow he'd landed himself in the road; an', sir, we rid up to thehotel like a coach and four, and he drapped dead in front of the steps, mestickin' as fast between his horns as if I'd 'a' growed to him. Yes, sir, they ackchally had to saw one of them horns off'n his head before they gotme out. "

He came to a full stop here, but this was not the end. 

"What became of the horns, Jed? Why didn't ye bring 'em along?"

"I did take the one they sawed off, to give to my partner, big Sam Harden. He was the biggest man I ever see, Sam Harden was. I left th' other hornin Kennettown for the captain's sister. She was as smart an' handsome awidow-woman as ever I see, an' I wanted for her to have a keepsake fromme. "

This was really the end. The circle of inquisitors left their unconsciousvictim nodding and grinning to himself, and went on down the road. Grandfather said he still felt mean all over to remember how they laughedamong themselves, and how they pointed out to the stranger the high lightsin the story. 

"Not only ain't there never been seen a moose in the State ofMassachusetts, and not only are a moose's horns set too wide to catch alittle squinch of a man like Jed, but what do you think?--there ain't noKennettown in Massachusetts! No, nor in any other State. No, nor neverwas. Old Jed just made the town up out of his head, like the moose, an'the money, and the birch-bark and the handsome widow. Don't he beat_all_?"

II

My grandfather was one of these boys; in fact, he always used to say hewas the ringleader, but that may have been another form of his penance. Ashe grew up he began to work into his father's business of tanning leather, and by and by, when a man grown, he traveled down to a big tannery atNewtonville, in Massachusetts, to learn some new processes inleather-curing. 

When grandfather got along to this part of the story he began stretchinghis long legs faster and faster, until I was obliged to trot along, panting. He always lived the hurried last part over again, and so did I, although it happened so long before I was born. 

One evening he was asked to tea by the mother of the prettiest girl in thevillage--she afterward became my grandmother--and was taken into the "bestroom" to see all the family curiosities. There were wax flowers andsilhouettes and relics of every description. Mrs. Hamilton spared him notone of these wonders. 

"This, " she said, "is the chain that was made of my grandfather's hair. Itwas finished and brought home on a Wednesday, and Thursday, the next day, grandfather was burned up in the great tannery fire, and this was all mygrandmother had to remember him by. These are the front teeth of a savagethat my uncle Josiah Abijah killed in the South Sea Islands. Uncle JosiahAbijah always said it was either him or the black man, but I have alwaysfelt that it was murder, just the same, and this is the stick ofbirch-wood that a sailor-man, who came here once to see my mother, killeda bull moose with. "

My grandmother has told me that never before or since did she see a humanface change as did grandfather's. 

"What?" he shouted, and his voice cracked. 

"Yes, it sounds queer, but it's so. It's the only time a moose was everseen here, and folks thought the wolves must have chased it till it wascrazy or tired out. This sailor-man, who happened to be here, saw it, ranout, snatched up a stick from the wood-pile, and went at that great animalall alone. Folks say he was the bravest man this town ever saw. He gotright up on its back--"

Grandmother said grandfather had turned so pale by this time that shethought he was going to faint and he sat down as if somebody had knockedhim down. On the dusty road to the cemetery, however, he only strode alongthe faster, half forgetting the little girl who dragged at his hand, andturned a sympathetically agitated face up to his narrative. 

Mrs. Hamilton went on through the whole incident, telling every singlething just the way old Jed did. She showed the dark places on thebirch-bark where the blood had stained it, and she said the skull of theanimal, with its one horn sawed off, was over among the relics in heraunt's home. 

"My Aunt Maria was accounted a very good-looking woman in her day, andthere were those that thought she might have taken a second husband, ifthe sailor had been so disposed. He was so brave and so honest, bringingall that money from my uncle, the sea-captain, when goodness knows, hemight have run off with every cent of it, and nobody been any the wiser!"

At this grandfather gave a loud exclamation and stood up, shaking his headas if he had the ague. He just couldn't believe his ears, he said. 

"No! No! _No_! It can't be the same!" he said over and over. "Why, he saidit happened in Kennettown. "

"Well, _now_!" said Mrs. Hamilton, surprised. "Where did you ever get holdof _that_ old name? I didn't suppose a soul but some of our old folksremembered that. Why, Newtonville wasn't named that but six months. Folksgot mad at the Kennetts for being so highfalutin' over having the townnamed after them, and so 'twas changed back. "

Grandfather said he'd no notion of another word she said after that. Whenhe went back to his room, he found a letter from home, telling him all thenews, and mentioning, among other things, that old Jedediah Chillingworthwasn't expected to live much longer. Age had withered the little old manuntil there wasn't enough of him left to go on living. Grandfather usuallyreached this part of the story just as we arrived under the big maplesthat stand on each side of the cemetery gate, and always stopped short tosay solemnly:

"Thank the _Lord_! I've two things to my credit. I never waited one minuteto start back to Hillsboro, and from that time on I wanted to do what wasright by the old man, even if it did turn out so different. "

Then we went on into the cemetery, and paced slowly along the windingpaths as he continued:

"I got to Hillsboro late one night, and I'd 'most killed my horse to doit. They said Jedediah was still alive, but wasn't expected to last tillmorning. I went right up to his little old shack, without waiting to seemy folks or to get a mouthful to eat. A whole lot of the neighbors hadcome in to watch with him, and even then, with the old dizzard actuallydying, they were making a fool of him. 

"He was half propped up in bed--he wasn't bigger than my fist by thattime--with red spots in his cheeks, and his eyes like glass, and he wasjust ending up that moose story. The folks were laughing and winking andnudging one another in the ribs, just the way I used to. I was done upwith my long, hard ride, and some nervous, I guess, for it fair turned mystomach to see them. 

"I waited till they were all through laughing, and then I broke loose. Ijust gave them a piece of my mind! 'Look-a-here, you fellows!' I said. 'You think you're awful smart, don't you, making fun of poor old Jed as helies a-dying? Now, listen to me. I've ridden forty miles over themountains to get here before he goes, and make every man jack of you begthe old man's pardon. _That story's true_. I've just found out that everyword of it is absolutely, literally the way it happened. Newtonville, where I'm staying in Massachusetts, used to be called Kennettown, andJedediah _did_ take the money there--yes, that exact sum we've laughed atall these years. They call him the honestest man in the world over there. They've got the stick of birch-wood, with the bloodstains on it, and themoose's skull, with the horn sawed off, and there are lots of old peoplewho remember all about it. And I'm here to say I believe old Jed's beentelling the truth, not only about that, but about all his adventures. I don't believe he's ever lied to us!'

"I felt so grand and magnanimous, " grandfather went on, "to think how Iwas making it up to the poor old man, and so set up over bringing a pieceof news that just paralyzed everybody with astonishment. They all jumpedup, yelling and carrying on. '_What_? That story _true_! Well, did youever! Wouldn't that beat all? To think old Jed's been telling--"

"And then we all thought of him, and started toward the bed to say how badwe felt. 

"I'll never forget how he looked. His eyes were fairly coming out of hishead, and his face was as white as paper. But that wasn't the dreadfulthing. What always comes back to me whenever I think of him is theexpression on his face. You could just see his heart breaking. He was sohurt, so surprised, so ashamed, that it wasn't decent to look at him. Butwe couldn't look away. We stood there, hanging our heads--I never felt somean in my life--while he tried to get breath enough to say something. Andthen he screamed out--'twas dreadful to hear:

"'Why, didn't you fellers _believe_ me? Did you think I was _lyin_?'"

Here grandfather stopped and blew his nose, and I choked. 

"Those were his last words. He had some kind of a spasm, and never came toenough to know anything before he died. Those were the last words he said;and though they told us that in the coffin he looked just as he alwayshad, only more quiet, with the foolish look gone, we were all of usashamed to look the dead man in the face. "

Here grandfather laid the flowers on the unkempt grave, as if to serve asan "Amen" to his confession. 

After this I always went around and held his hand tightly, and we stoodvery still. It was the solemnest time of the year. 

III

All this used to happen, as I said, when I was a little girl; but I, too, grew up, as grandfather grew bent and feeble. When he was an old, old manof eighty-five, and when I had been away from Hillsboro several yearsteaching school, the last of my grandmother's relatives in Newtonvilledied. I was sent for to decide what should be done with the few familyrelics, and one Saturday and Sunday I went all through the little oldhouse, looking over the things. 

In the garret I came across the moose-skull with one horn. It made me feelqueer to think what a part it had played in the development of mygrandfather's honorable and tender old soul. There were a few sticks offurniture, some daguerrotypes and silhouettes, and a drawerful of yellowpapers. The first I sent home to Hillsboro to grandmother. I took thepapers back to the town where I was teaching, to look over them. 

Among other things was a quaint old diary of my grandmother's great-aunt, she that was the buxom widow of Jed's story. It was full of homely itemsof her rustic occupations; what day she had "sett the broune hen, " and howmuch butter was made the first month she had the "party-colored cowe fromover the mount'n. " I glanced idly at these faded bits of insignificantnews, when I was electrified by seeing the following entry:

#This day came to my Bro. Amos and Me, a sea-man, bringeing news of myBro. Elijah's the capt'n's dethe, and allso mutch monie in gold, sent tous by our Bro. The sea-man is the greatest in size aver I saw. No man intowne his bed can reach so mutch as to his sholder. And comely withal#. 

The words fairly whirled on the page before my astonished eyes. Where wasthe image of the ill-favored little old Jed, so present to my imagination?I read on breathlessly, skipping news of the hen-house and barnyard, untilI came upon this, the only other reference, but quite sufficient:

This day the sea-man, Samuel Harden, left us. 

The self-restrained woman had said nothing of any disappointment she mighthave felt. The item stood quite alone, however, in a significantisolation. At least on that day she had not noticed the number of eggs. 

I doubt if grandfather himself had been more excited when he saw thebirch-wood club than I was to read those few words. I could hardly waittill the next Saturday to rush back to Hillsboro, and relieve the poor oldman of the burden of remorse he had carried so faithfully and somistakenly all these years, and to snatch the specious crown of martyrdomfrom that shameless thief of another man's exploits. 

And yet, when I finally arrived at Hillsboro, I found it not so easy tobegin. Some strange spell, exhaled from the unchanging aspect of the oldhouse and the old people, fell on me, and, though I tried several times, Icould not find a suitable opening. On Sunday morning grandfather asked meif I would help him to get out to Jed's grave. The peonies and syringaswere in bloom, and grandmother had the bouquet made up ready. Drawing measide, she to me that grandfather was really too infirm to try to make theexpedition at all, and certainly could not go alone. Even then I couldfind no words to tell her. I thought it might be easier to do so out ofdoors. 

It was the middle of a bright spring morning, when we started off, grandfather leaning on his cane and holding to my arm, while I carried thegreat clump of red peonies and white syringas. The sun was warm, but acool breeze blew down from the mountains, and grandfather hobbled alongbravely. 

It made me feel like a little girl again to have him begin the story ofthe moose, and tell it word for word as he always had. He was forced tostop often now, and wait for breath to come back to him. At each of thesehalts beside the road, which was white in the clear spring sunshine, itwas harder and harder to think of breaking in on him with my discovery. 

As he finally told about Jedediah's wounded virtue on his deathbed--thatoutcry which seemed to me the most brazen part of the wholeimposture--suddenly my heart softened, and I, too, believed that by thattime of his life old Jed was--I really don't know just what it was that Ibelieved, but it was something as comforting as the quiet warmth of thesunshine. 

We were standing by the sunken old grave when grandfather finished. Ilooked at him, the sun shining down on his bent figure and bared whitehead, the flowers reflecting their brightness up into his withered oldface, and a lump came into my throat. I could not have told him if I hadwished to. 

"We were ashamed to look the dead man in the face, " he said humbly, andlaid the flowers down on the young grass. 

Then I went around and held his dear old hand tightly in mine; and westood very still for a long, long time. 

THE ARTIST

"After the sickening stench of personality in theatrical life, " the greatMadame Orloff told the doctor with her usual free-handed use of language, "it is like breathing a thin, pure air to be here again with our dearinhuman old Vieyra. He hypnotizes me into his own belief that nothingmatters--not broken hearts, nor death, nor success, nor first love, norold age---nothing but the chiaroscuro of his latest acquisition. "

The picture-dealer looked at her in silence, bringing the point of hiswhite beard up to his chin with a meditative fist. The big surgeon gazedabout him with appreciative eyes, touched his mustache to his gold-linedcoffee-cup, and sighed contentedly. "You're not the only one, my dearOlga, " he said, "who finds Vieyra's hard heart a blessing. When I am herein his magnificent old den, listening to one of his frank accounts of hisown artistic acumen and rejoicing in his beautiful possessions, why therest of the world--real humanity--seems in retrospect like one greathospital full of shrieking incurables. "

"Oh, humanity----!" The actress thrust it away with one of her startling, vivid gestures. 

"You think it very clever, my distinguished friends, to discuss me beforemy face, " commented the old picture-dealer indifferently. He fingered thebright-colored decorations on his breast, looking down at them with absenteyes. After a moment he added, "and to show your in-ti-mate knowledge ofmy character. " Only its careful correctness betrayed the foreignness ofhis speech. 

There was a pause in which the three gazed idly at the fire's reflectionin the brass of the superb old andirons Then, "Haven't you something newto show us?" asked the woman. "Some genuine Masaccio, picked up in ahill-town monastery--a real Ribera?"

The small old Jew drew a long breath. "Yes, I have something new. " Hehesitated, opened his lips, closed them again and, looking at the fire, "Oh yes, very new indeed--new to me. "

"Is it here?" The great surgeon looked about the picture-covered walls. 

"No; I have it in--you know what you call the inner sanctuary--the lighthere is not good enough. "

The actress stood up, her glittering dress flashing a thousand eyes at thefire. "Let me see it, " she commanded. "Certainly I would like to seeanything that was new to _you_!"

"You shall amuse yourself by identifying the artist without my aid, " saidold Vieyra. 

He opened a door, held back a portière, let his guests pass through into adarkened room, turned on a softly brilliant light, and: "Whom do you makethe artist?" he said. He did not look at the picture. He looked at thefaces of his guests, and after a long silent pause, he smiled faintly intohis beard. "Let us go back to the fire, " he said, and clicked them intodarkness again. 

"And what do you say?" he asked as they sat down. 

"By Jove!" cried the doctor. "By Jove!"

Madame Orloff turned on the collector the somber glow of her deep-seteyes. "I have dreamed it, " she said. 

"It is real, " said Vieyra. "You are the first to see it. I wished toobserve how----"

"It's an unknown Vermeer!" The doctor brought his big white hand downloudly on this discovery. "Nobody but Vermeer could have done the plasterwall in the sunlight. And the girl's strange gray head-dress must beseventeenth-century Dutch of some province I don't----"

"I am a rich man, for a picture-dealer, " said Vieyra, "but only nationalgovernments can afford to buy Vermeers nowadays. "

"But you picked it up from some corner, some attic, some stable----"

"Yes, I picked it up from a stable, " said the collector. 

The actress laid her slender, burning fingers on his cool old hand. "Tellus--tell us, " she urged. "There is something different here. "

"Yes, there is something different, " he stirred in his chair and thrustout his lips. "So different that I don't know if you----"

"Try me! try me!" she assured him ardently. "You have educated me well toyour own hard standards all these years. "

At this he looked at her, startled, frowning, attentive, and ended byshaking off her hand. "No, I will not tell you. "

"You shall----" her eyes commanded, adjured him. There was a silence. "Iwill understand, " she said under her breath. 

"You will not understand, " he said in the same tone; but aloud he began:"I heard of it first from an American picture-dealer over here scraping upa mock-Barbizon collection for a new millionaire. He wanted to get myjudgment, he said, on a canvas that had been brought to him by a cousin ofhis children's governess. I was to be sure to see it when I went to NewYork--you knew did you not, that I had been called to New York to testifyin the prosecution of Paullsen for selling a signed copy?"

"Did you really go?" asked the doctor. "I thought you swore that nothingcould take you to America. "

"I went, " said the old man grimly. "Paullsen did me a bad turn once, thirty years ago. And while I was there I went to see the unknown canvas. The dealer half apologized for taking my time--said he did not as a rulepay any attention to freak things brought in from country holes byamateurs, but--I remember his wording--this thing, some ways he looked atit, didn't seem bad somehow. "

The collector paused, passed his tongue over his lips, and said briefly:"Then he showed it to me. It was the young girl and kitten in there. "

"By Jove!" cried the doctor. 

"You have too exciting a profession, my good old dear, " said the actress. "Some day you will die of a heart failure. "

"Not after living through that!"

"What did you tell him?"

"I asked for the address of the cousin of his children's governess, ofcourse. When I had it, I bought a ticket to the place, and when I reachedthere, I found myself at the end of all things--an abomination ofdesolation, a parched place in the wilderness. Do you know America, eitherof you?"

The doctor shook his head. 

"I have toured there, three times, " said the actress. 

"Did you ever hear of a place called Vermont?"

Madame Orloff looked blank. "It sounds French, not English. Perhaps you donot pronounce it as they do. "

"Heaven forbid that I should do anything as 'they' do! This place, then, call it what you will, is inhabited by a lean, tall, sullenly silent racewho live in preposterously ugly little wooden houses of the most nakedcleanliness . . . God of my Fathers! the hideousness of the huddle of thosehuts where I finally found the cousin! He was a seller of letter-paper andcheap chromos and he knew nothing of the picture except that it wasbrought to him to sell by the countryman who sold him butter. So I foundthe address of the butter-maker and drove endless miles over an execrableroad to his house, and encountered at last a person who could tell mesomething of what I wanted to know. It was the butter-maker's mother, astolid, middle-aged woman, who looked at me out of the most uncanny quieteyes . . . All the people in that valley have extraordinary piercing andquiet eyes . . . And asked, 'Is it about the picture? For if it is, I don'twant you should let on about it to anybody but me. Nobody but the familyknows he paints 'em!"

At this the doctor burst out, "Gracious powers! You don't mean to say thatthe man who painted that picture is alive now . . . In 1915!"

The actress frowned at the interruption and turned with a lithe petulanceon the big Briton. "If you want to know, let him alone!" she commanded. 

"And soon I had it all, " the narrator went on. "Almost more than I couldbear. The old woman could tell me what I wished to know, she said. He washer uncle, the only brother of her mother, and he had brought up her andher brothers and sisters. She knew. . . Oh, she knew with good reason, allof his life. All, that is, but the beginning. She had heard from the olderpeople in the valley that he had been wild in his youth (he has alwaysbeen, she told me gravely, 'queer') and she knew that he had traveled farin his young days, very, very far. "

"'To New York?' I ventured. 

"'Oh, no, beyond that. Across the water. '

"'To Paris?'

"That she didn't know. It was a foreign country at least, and he had stayedthere two, three years, until he was called back by her father'sdeath--his brother-in-law's--to take care of his mother, and his sisterand the children. Here her mind went back to my question, and she said shehad something perhaps I could tell from, where he had been. She kept it inher Bible. He had given it to her when she was a child as a reward the dayshe had kept her little brother from falling in the fire. She brought itout. It was a sketch, hasty, vigorous, suggestive, haunting as theoriginal itself, of the Leonardo da Vinci Ste. Anne. 

"Yes, I told her, now I knew where he had been. And they had called himback from there--_here_?

"'When my father died, ' she repeated, 'my uncle was all my grandmother andmy mother had. We were five little children, and the oldest not seven, andwe were all very poor, '

"'How old was your uncle then?' I asked. 

"'A young man--he was younger than my mother. Perhaps he was twenty-five, '

"I looked at the sketch in my hand. Twenty-five, and called back fromParis--_here_!

"'When did he go back to Paris?'

"'Oh, he never went back, ' She told me this quite placidly, as she saideverything else. 'He never went back at all. '

"He had stayed there the rest of his life, and worked the little farm thatwas all his sister had, and made a living for them--not large, the farmbeing poor and he not a first-class farmer, but still enough. He hadalways been kind to them--if he was quite queer and absent. She had heardher grandmother say that at first, the first ten years, perhaps, he hadhad strange, gloomy savage fits like a person possessed that you read ofin the Bible; but she herself could never remember him as anything butquiet and smiling. He had a very queer smile unlike anyone else, as Iwould notice for myself when I went to see him about the picture. Youcould tell him by that, and by his being very lame. 

"That brought me back with a start. I rushed at her with questions. 'Howabout the picture? Were there others? Were there many? Had he alwayspainted? Had he never shown them to anyone? Was he painting now?

"She could not tell me much. It had been a detail of their common life shehad but absently remarked, as though she had lived with a man whocollected snail-shells, or studied the post-marks on letters. She 'hadnever noticed'--that was the answer to most of my questions. No, she didnot think there were very many now, though he must have painted 'most amillion. He was always at it, every minute he could spare from farming. But they had been so poor he had not felt he could afford many canvases. The paints cost a good deal too. So he painted them over and over, firstone thing and then another, as he happened to fancy. He painted in thehorse-barn. 'Had a place rigged up, ' in her phrase, in one corner of theroom where the hay was stored, and had cut a big window in the roof thatwas apt to let in water on the hay if the rain came from the north. 

"'What did he paint?' 'Oh, anything. He was queer about that. He'd paint_any_thing! He did one picture of nothing but the corner of the barnyard, with a big white sow and some little pigs in the straw, early in themorning, when the dew was on everything. He had thought quite a lot ofthat, but he had had to paint over it to make the picture of her littlesister with the yellow kittie--the one she'd sent down to the village totry to sell, the one--'

"'Yes, yes, ' I told her, 'the one I saw. But did he never try to sell anyhimself? Did he never even show them to anyone?'

"She hesitated, tried to remember, and said that once when they were verypoor, and there was a big doctor's bill to pay, he _had_ sent a picturedown to New York. But it was sent back. They had made a good deal of funof it, the people down there, because it wasn't finished off enough. Shethought her uncle's feelings had been hurt by their letter. The expressdown and back had cost a good deal too, and the only frame he had gotbroken. Altogether, she guessed that discouraged him. Anyhow, he'd nevertried again. He seemed to get so after a while that he didn't care whetheranybody liked them or even saw them or not--he just painted them to amusehimself, she guessed. He seemed to get a good real of comfort out of it. It made his face very still and smiling to paint. Nobody around there somuch as knew he did it, the farm was so far from neighbors. 

"'Twas a real lonely place, she told me, and she had been glad to marryand come down in the valley to live closer to folks. Her uncle had givenher her wedding outfit. He had done real well by them all, and they weregrateful; and now he was getting feeble and had trouble with his heart, they wanted to do something for him. They had thought, perhaps, they couldsell some of his pictures for enough to hire a man to help him with thefarm work. She had heard that pictures were coming into fashion more thanthey had been, and she had borrowed that one of her little sister and thekittie, and without her uncle's knowing anything about it, had sent itoff. She was about discouraged waiting for somebody down in the city tomake up his mind whether he'd buy it or not. 

"I asked her a thousand other questions but she could answer none of them. The only detail I could get from her being an account of her uncle's habitof 'staring' for sometimes a half an hour at something, without oncelooking away. She'd seen him stop that way, when he'd be husking cornmaybe, and stare at a place where a sunbeam came in on a pile of corn. Itput him back quite considerable in his work, that habit, but they hadnothing to complain of. He'd done well by them, when you considered theyweren't his own children. 

"'Hadn't he ever tried to break away?' I asked her amazed. 'To leave them?To go back?'

"She told me: 'Oh, no, he was the only support his mother and his sisterhad, and there were all the little children. He _had_ to stay. '"

The actress broke in fiercely: "Oh, stop! stop! it makes me sick to hear. I could boil them in oil, that family! Quick! You saw him? You brought himaway? You--"

"I saw him, " said Vieyra, "yes, I saw him. "

Madame Orloff leaned toward him, her eyebrows a line of painful attention. 

"I drove that afternoon up to a still tinier village in the mountains nearwhere he lived, and there I slept that night--or, at least, I lay in abed. "

"Of course, you could not sleep, " broke in the listening woman; "I shallnot to-night. "

"When dawn came I dressed and went out to wander until people should beawake. I walked far, through fields, and then through a wood as red asred-gold--like nothing I ever saw. It was in October, and the sun was lateto rise. When I came out on an uplying heath, the mists were justbeginning to roll away from the valley below. As I stood there, leaningagainst a tree in the edge of the wood, some cows came by, little, pinched, lean cows and a young dog bounding along, and then, after them, slowly, an old man in gray--very lame. "

The actress closed her eyes. 

"He did not see me. He whistled to the dog and stroked his head, and thenas the cows went through a gate, he turned and faced the rising sun, thelight full on his face. He looked at the valley coming into sight throughthe mists. He was so close to me I could have tossed a stone to him--Ishall never know how long he stood there--how long I had that face beforeme. "

The narrator was silent. Madame Orloff opened her eyes and looked at himpiercingly. 

"I cannot tell you--I cannot!" he answered her. 'Who can tell of life anddeath and a new birth? It was as though I were thinking with myfinger-nails, or the hair of my head--a part of me I had never beforedreamed had feeling. My eyes were dazzled. I could have bowed myself tothe earth like Moses before the burning bush. How can I tell you--? Howcan I tell you?"

"He was--?" breathed the woman. 

"Hubert van Eyck might have painted God the Father with those eyes--thatmouth--that face of patient power--of selfless, still beatitude. --Once thedog, nestling by his side, whimpered and licked his hand. He looked down, he turned his eyes away from his vision, and looked down at the animal andsmiled. Jehovah! What a smile. It seemed to me then that if God loveshumanity, he can have no kinder smile for us. And then he looked backacross the valley--at the sky, at the mountains, at the smoke rising fromthe houses below us--he looked at the world--at some vision, someknowledge--what he saw--what he saw--!

"I did not know when he went. I was alone in that crimson wood. 

"I went back to the village. I went back to the city. I would not speak tohim till I had some honor worthy to offer him. I tried to think what wouldmean most to him. I remembered the drawing of the Ste. Anne. I rememberedhis years in Paris, and I knew what would seem most honor to him. I cabledDrouot of the Luxembourg Gallery. I waited in New York till he came. Ishowed him the picture. I told him the story. He was on fire!

"We were to go back to the mountains together, to tell him that hispicture would hang in the Luxembourg, and then in the Louvre--that in allprobability he would be decorated by the French government, that otherpictures of his would live for all time in Paris, in London, inBrussels--a letter came from the woman, his niece. He was dead. "

The actress fell back in her chair, her hands over her face. 

The surgeon stirred wrathfully. "Heavens and earth, Vieyra, what beastly, ghastly, brutally tragic horror are you telling us, anyhow?"

The old Jew moistened his lips and was silent. After a moment he said: "Ishould not have told you. I knew you could not understand. "

Madame Orloff looked up sharply. "Do you mean--is it possible that _you_mean that if we had seen him--had seen that look--we would--that he hadhad all that an artist--"

The picture-dealer addressed himself to her, turning his back on thedoctor. "I went back to the funeral, to the mountains. The niece told methat before he died he smiled suddenly on them all and said: 'I have had ahappy life, ' I had taken a palm to lay on his coffin, and after I hadlooked long at his dead face, I put aside the palm. I felt that if he hadlived I could never have spoken to him---could never have told him. "

The old Jew looked down at the decorations on his breast, and around atthe picture-covered walls. He made a sweeping gesture. 

"What had I to offer him?" he said. 

WHO ELSE HEARD IT?

 A lady walking through the square With steamship tickets in her hand, To spend her summer in the Alps, Her winter in the Holy Land, Heard (or else dreamed), as she passed by The Orphan Home across the way, A small and clear and wondering voice From out a dormer window say, "And would you really rather climb Mont Blanc alone, than walk with me Out hunting Mayflowers in the woods Of Westerburn and Cloverlea?

 "Alas! And would you rather hear Cathedral choirs in cities far Than one at bedtime, on your lap, Say 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star'?"

 "A lonely Christmas would you spend By Galilee or Jordan's tide When a child's stocking you might fill And hang it by your own fireside?"

A DROP IN THE BUCKET

There is no need to describe in detail the heroine of this tale, becauseshe represents a type familiar to all readers of the conventionalNew-England-village dialect story. She was for a long time the soleinhabitant of Hillsboro, who came up to the expectations of our visitingfriends from the city, on the lookout for Mary Wilkins characters. Wealways used to take such people directly to see Cousin Tryphena, asdwellers in an Italian city always take their foreign friends to see theirone bit of ruined city wall or the heap of stones which was once anInquisitorial torture chamber, never to see the new water-works or themodern, sanitary hospital. 

On the way to the other end of the street, where Cousin Tryphena's tiny, two-roomed house stood, we always laid bare the secrets of her somnolent, respectable, unprofitable life; we always informed our visitors that shelived and kept up a social position on two hundred and fifteen dollars ayear, and that she had never been further from home than to the nextvillage. We always drew attention to her one treasure, the fine Sheratonsideboard that had belonged to her great-grandfather, old Priest Perkins;and, when we walked away from the orderly and empty house, we were surethat our friends from the city would always exclaim with great insightinto character, "What a charmingly picturesque life! Isn't she perfectlydelicious!"

Next door to Cousin Tryphena's minute, snow-white house is a forlorn oldbuilding, one of the few places for rent in our village, where nearlyeveryone owns his own shelter. It stood desolately idle for some time, tumbling to pieces almost visibly, until, one day, two years ago, a burly, white-bearded tramp stopped in front of it, laid down his stick and bundle, and went to inquire at the neighbor's if the place were for rent, thenmoved in with his stick and bundle and sent away for the rest of hisbelongings, that is to say, an outfit for cobbling shoes. He cut a bigwooden boot out of the side of an empty box, painted it black withaxle-grease and soot, hung it up over the door, and announced himself asready to do all the cobbling and harness-repairing he could get . . . And afine workman he showed himself to be. 

We were all rather glad to have this odd new member of our communitysettle down among us . . . All, that is, except Cousin Tryphena, who wassure, for months afterward, that he would cut her throat some night andsteal away her Sheraton sideboard. It was an open secret that Putnam, theantique-furniture dealer in Troy, had offered her two hundred and fiftydollars for it. The other women of the village, however, not living alonein such dangerous proximity to the formidable stranger, felt reassured byhis long, white beard, and by his great liking for little children. 

Although, from his name, as from his strong accent, it was evident thatold Jombatiste belonged, by birth, to our French-Canadian colony, he neverassociated himself with that easy-going, devoutly Catholic, law-abiding, and rather unlettered group of our citizens. He allied himself with quiteanother class, making no secret of the fact that he was an out-and-outSocialist, Anti-clerical, Syndicalist, Anarchist, Nihilist. . . . We inHillsboro are not acute in distinguishing between the different shades ofradicalism, and never have been able exactly to place him, except that, beside his smashing, loudly-voiced theories, young Arthur Robbins'Progressivism sounds like old Martin Pelham's continued jubilation overthe Hayes campaign. 

The central article of Jombatiste's passionately held creed seemed to bethat everything was exactly wrong, and that, while the Socialist party wasnot nearly sweeping enough in its ideas, it was, as yet, the best meansfor accomplishing the inevitable, righteous overturning of society. Accordingly, he worked incessantly, not only at his cobbling, but at anyodd job he could find to do, lived the life of an anchorite, went in rags, ate mainly crackers and milk, and sent every penny he could save to theSocialist Headquarters. We knew about this not only through his owntrumpeting of the programme of his life, but because Phil Latimer, thepostmaster, is cousin to us all and often told us about the money-orders, so large that they must have represented almost all the earnings of thefanatical old shoemaker. 

And yet he was never willing to join in any of our charitable enterprises, although his ardent old heart was evidently as tender as it was hot. Nothing threw him into such bellowing fury as cruelty. He became theterror of all our boys who trapped rabbits, and, indeed, by the soleinfluence of his whirlwind descents upon them, and his highly illegaldestruction of their traps, he practically made that boyish pastime athing of the past in Hillsboro. Somehow, though the boys talked mightilyabout how they'd have the law of dirty, hot-tempered old Jombatiste, nobody cared really to face him. He had on tap a stream of red-hotvituperation astonishingly varied for a man of his evident lack of earlyeducation. Perhaps it came from his incessant reading and absorption ofSocialist and incendiary literature. 

He took two Socialist newspapers, and nobody knows how many queer littleinflammatory magazines from which he read aloud selections to anyone whodid not run away. 

Naturally enough, from his point of view, he began with his neighbor, fastidious Cousin Tryphena. 

What Cousin Tryphena did not know about the way the world outside ofHillsboro was run would have made a complete treatise on moderncivilization. She never took a newspaper, only borrowing, once in a while, the local sheet to read the news items from Greenford, where she had somedistant cousins; and, though she occasionally looked at one of theillustrated magazines, it was only at the pictures. 

It is therefore plain that old Jombatiste could not have found a worselistener for his bellowed statements that ninety per cent. Of the money ofthis country was in the hands of two per cent. Of the population; that thefranchise was a farce because the government was controlled by a WallStreet clique; and that any man who could not earn a good living for hisfamily had a moral right to shoot a millionaire. For the most part, CousinTryphena counted her tatting stitches and paid not the least attention toher malcontent neighbor. When she did listen, she did not believe a wordhe said. She had lived in Hillsboro for fifty-five years and she knew whatmade people poor. It was shiftlessness. There was always plenty of work tobe had at the brush-back factory for any man who had the sense andbackbone to keep at it. If they _would_ stop work in deer-week to gohunting, or go on a spree Town-meeting day, or run away to fish, she'dlike to know what business they had blaming millionaires because they losttheir jobs. She did not expound her opinions of these points to Jombatistebecause, in the first place, she despised him for a dirty Canuck, and, secondly, because opinions seemed shadowy and unsubstantial things to her. The important matters were to make your starch clear and not to be late tochurch. 

It is proverbial that people who are mostly silent often keep for sometime a reputation for more wisdom than is theirs. Cousin Tryphenaunconsciously profited in the estimation of her neighbor by this fact ofpsychology. Old Jombatiste had thundered his per cents. Of thedistribution of capital for many months before he discovered that he wason the wrong track. 

Then, one winter day, as Cousin Tryphena was hanging out her washing, heran over to her, waving his favorite magazine. He read her a paragraphfrom it, striking the paper occasionally for emphasis with his horny, blackened, shoemaker's hand, and following her as she moved along theclothes-lines----

"And it is thus definitely _proved, _" he shouted in conclusion, "thatSenator Burlingame was in the pay of J. D. Darby, when he held up the RouseWorkingman's Bill in the Senate Committee. . . . " He stopped and glaredtriumphantly at his neighbor. A rare impulse of perversity rose in CousinTryphena's unawakened heart. She took a clothes-pin out of her mouth andasked with some exasperation, "Well, what _of_ it!" a comment on hisinformation which sent the old man reeling back as though she had struckhim. 

In the conversation which followed, old Jombatiste, exploring at lastCousin Tryphena's mind, leaned giddily over the abyss of her ignorance ofpolitical economy and sociology, dropping one exploring plummet afteranother into its depths, only to find them fathomless. He went shakilyback to his own house, silenced for once. 

But, although for the first time he neglected work to do it, he returnedto the attack the next day with a new weapon. He made no more remarksabout industrial slavery, nor did he begin, as was his wont, with thesolemnly enunciated axiom, "Wealth comes from labor alone!" He laid down, on the Sheraton sideboard, an armful of his little magazines, and settledhimself in a chair, observing with a new comprehension how instinctivelyCousin Tryphena reached for her tatting as he began to read aloud. He readthe story of a man who was burned to death in molten steel because hisemployers did not install a rather expensive safety device, and who lefta young widow and three children. These tried to earn their livings bymaking artificial flowers. They could earn, all of them working together, three cents an hour. When the last dollar of the dead father's savings wasused up, and there was talk of separating the family so that the childrencould be put in an asylum, the mother drowned the three little ones andherself after them. Cousin Tryphena dropped her tatting, her country-bredmind reeling. "Didn't she have any _folks_ to help her out?"

Jombatiste explained that she came from East Poland, so that her folks, ifindeed she had any, were too far away to be of use. He struck one fistinside his palm with a fierce gesture, such as he used when he caught aboy trapping, and cried, ". . . And that in a country that produces threetimes the food it consumes. " For the first time, a statistical statementawoke an echo in Cousin Tryphena's atrophied brain. 

Old Jombatiste read on, this time about a girl of seventeen, left by herparents' death in charge of a small brother. She had been paid twentycents for making crocheted lace which sold for a dollar and a half. Byworking twelve hours a day, she had been able to make forty-seven cents. Seeing her little brother grow pale from lack of food, she had, indesperation, taken the first, the awfully decisive first step downward, and had almost at once thereafter vanished, drawn down by the maelstrom ofvice. The little brother, wild with grief over his sister's disappearance, had been taken to an orphan asylum where he had since twice tried tocommit suicide. 

Cousin Tryphena sat rigid, her tatting fallen to the floor, her breathcoming with difficulty. It is impossible for the average modern mind, calloused by promiscuous reading, to conceive the effect upon herprimitive organism of this attack from the printed page. She not only didnot dream that these stories might not be true, they seemed as real to heras though she had seen the people. There was not a particle of blood inher haggard face. 

Jombatiste read on--the story of a decent, ambitious man, employed in asweatshop tailoring establishment, who contracted tuberculosis from thefoul air, and who dragged down with him, in his agonizing descent to thevery depths of misery, a wife and two children. He was now dead, and hiswife was living in a corner of a moldy, damp basement, a pile of rags theonly bed for her and her children, their only heat what fire the mothercould make out of paper and rubbish picked up on the streets. 

Cousin Tryphena's horrified eyes fell on her well-blacked stove, sendingout the aromatic breath of burning white-birch sticks. She recoiled fromit with a shudder. 

Jombatiste read on, the story of the woman who, when her three sons diedin an accident due to negligence on their employer's part . . . He read nomore that day, for Cousin Tryphena put her gray head down on thecenter-table and wept as she never had done in her life. Jombatiste rosesoftly and tiptoed out of the room. 

The tap-tap-tap of his hammer rang loud and fast the rest of that day. Hewas exulting over having aroused another bourgeois from the sleep ofgreasy complacency. He had made a convert. To his dire and utterpennilessness, Cousin Tryphena's tiny income seemed a fortune. He had ahappy dream of persuading her to join him in his weekly contributions tothe sacred funds! As he stood at midnight, in the open door, for the longdraught of fresh air he always took before turning in on his pile of hay, he heard in the wood on the hill back of the house the shrill shriek of atrapped rabbit. He plowed furiously out through the deep snow to find it, gave the tortured animal a merciful death, carried the trap back to theriver and threw it in with a furious splash. He strode home under thefrosty stars, his dirty shirt open over his corded, old neck, his burningheart almost content. He had done a good day's work. 

Early the next morning, his neighbor came to his door, very white, veryhollow-eyed, evidently with a sleepless night back of her, and asked himfor the papers he had read from. Jombatiste gave them to her in a tactfulsilence. She took them in one shaking hand, drawing her shawl around herwrinkled face with the other, and went back through the snow to her ownhouse. 

By noon that day, everyone in the village was thrilling with wild surmise. Cousin Tryphena had gone over to Graham and Sanders', asked to use theirlong-distance telephone and had telephoned to Putnam to come and get hersideboard. After this strange act, she had passed Albert Graham, then bychance alone in the store, with so wild a mien that he had not ventured tomake any inquiries. But he took pains to mention the matter, to everyonewho happened to come in, that morning; and, by dinner-time, every familyin Hillsboro was discussing over its pie the possibility that thewell-known _queer streak_, which had sent several of Cousin Tryphena'sancestors to the asylum, was suddenly making its appearance in her. 

I was detained, that afternoon, and did not reach her house until nearlyfour; and I was almost the last to arrive. I found Cousin Tryphena verysilent, her usually pale face very red, the center of a group of neighborswho all at once began to tell me what had happened. I could make nothingout of their incoherent explanations. . . . "Trypheny was crazy . . . She'dought to have a guardeen . . . That Canuck shoemaker had addled herbrains . . . There'd ought to be a law against that kind ofnewspaper. . . . Trypheny was goin' like her great-aunt, Lucilly, that diedin the asylum. . . . " I appealed directly to Cousin Tryphena for informationas to what the trouble was. 

"There ain't any trouble 's I know of, " she answered in a shaking voice. "I've just heard of a widow-woman, down in the city, who's bringin' up hertwo children in the corner of a basement where the green mold stands outon the wall, and I'm goin' down to fetch her an' the children up here tolive with me . . . Them an' a little orphan boy as don't like the 'sylumwhere they've put him----"

Somebody broke in on her to cry, "Why, Trypheny, you simple old critter, that's four people! Where you goin' to put 'em in this little tucked-upplace?"

Cousin Tryphena answered doggedly and pointedly, "Your own grandmother, Rebecca Mason, brought up a family of seven in a house no bigger thanthis, and no cellar. "

"But how, . . . " another voice exclaimed, "air you goin' to get enough for'em to eat? You ain't got but barely enough for yourself!"

Cousin Tryphena paled a little, "I'm a good sewer, I could make moneysewing . . . And I could do washings for city-folks, summer-times. . . . " Herset mouth told what a price she paid for this voluntary abandonment of thesocial standing that had been hers by virtue of her idleness. She went onwith sudden spirit, "You all act as though I was doin' it to spite you andto amuse myself! I don't _want_ to! When I think of my things I've kept sonice always, I'm _wild_ . . . But how can I help it, now I know about 'em! Ididn't sleep a wink last night. I'll go clean crazy if I don't dosomething! I saw those three children strugglin' in the water and theirmother a-holdin' on 'em down, and then jumpin' in herself----Why, I giveenough milk to the _cat_ to keep a baby . . . What else can I do?"

I was touched, as I think we all were, by her helpless simplicity andignorance, and by her defenselessness against this first vision of life, the vision which had been spared her so long, only to burst upon her likea forest-fire. I hid an odd fancy that she had just awakened after a sleepof half a century. 

"Dear Cousin Tryphena, " I said as gently as I could, "you haven't had avery wide experience of modern industrial or city conditions and there aresome phases of this matter which you don't take into consideration. " ThenI brought out the old, wordy, eminently reasonable arguments we all use tostifle the thrust of self-questioning: I told her that it was very likelythat the editor of that newspaper had invented, or at least greatlyexaggerated those stories, and that she would find on investigation thatno such family existed. 

"I don't see how that lets me out of _lookin'_ for them, " said CousinTryphena. 

"Well, at least, " I urged, "don't be in such a hurry about it. Take timeto think it over! Wait till--"

"Wait!" cried Cousin Tryphena. "Why, another one may be jumpin' in theriver this minute! If I'd ha' had the money, I'd ha' gone on the noontrain!"

At this point, the man from Putnam's came with a team from our livery tocarry away the Sheraton sideboard. Cousin Tryphena bore herself like amartyr at the stake, watching, with dry eyes, the departure of her onecertificate to dear gentility and receiving with proud indifference thecrisp bills of a denomination most of us had never seen before. 

"You won't need all that just to go down to the city, " I remonstrated. 

She stopped watching the men load her shining old treasure into the wagonand turned her anguished eyes to me. "They'll likely be needing clothesand things. "

I gave up. She had indeed thought it all out. 

It was time for us to go home to prepare our several suppers and we wentour different ways, shaking our heads over Tryphena's queerness. I stoppeda moment before the cobbler's open door, watched him briskly sewing abroken halter and telling a folk-tale to some children by his knee. Whenhe finished, I said with some acerbity, "Well, Jombatiste, I hope you'resatisfied with what you've done to poor old Miss Tryphena . . . Spoiling therest of her life for her!"

"Such a life, Madame, " said Jombatiste dryly, "ought to be spoiled, thesooner the better. "

"She's going to start for the city to-morrow, " I said, supposing of coursethat he had heard the news. 

Jombatiste looked up very quickly. "For what goes she to the city?"

"Why . . . She's gone daft over those bogie-stories of yours . . . She'slooked the list over and picked out the survivors, the widow of the manwho died of tuberculosis, and so on, and she's going to bring them backhere to share her luxurious life. "

Jombatiste bounded into the air as if a bomb had exploded under him, scattering his tools and the children, rushing past me out of the houseand toward Cousin Tryphena's. . . . As he ran, he did what I have never seenanyone do, out of a book; he tore at his bushy hair and scattered handfulsin the air. It seemed to me that some sudden madness had struck our dulllittle village, and I hastened after him to protect Cousin Tryphena. 

She opened the door in answer to his battering knocks, frowned, and beganto say something to him, but was fairly swept off her feet by the torrentof his reproaches. . . . "How dare you take the information I give you anduse it to betray your fellow-man! How do you _dare_ stand there, somealy-mouthed, and face me, when you are planning a cowardly attack on theliberty of your country! You call yourself a nurse . . . What would youthink of a mother who hid an ulcer in her child's side from the doctorbecause it did not look pretty! What _else_ are you planning to do? Whatwould you think of a nurse who put paint and powder on her patient's face, to cover up a filthy skin disease? What else are you planning todo . . . You with your plan to put court-plaster over one pustule in tenmillion and thinking you are helping cure the patient! You are planningsimply to please yourself, you cowardly . . . And you are an idiot too . . . "he beat his hands on the door-jambs, ". . . If you had the money of fortymillionaires, you couldn't do anything in that way . . . How many people areyou thinking to help . . . Two, three . . . Maybe four! But there are hundredsof others . . . Why, I could read you a thousand stories of worse--"

Cousin Tryphena's limit had been reached. She advanced upon the intruderwith a face as excited as his own. . . . "Jombatiste Ramotte, if you everdare to read me another such story, I'll go right out and jump in theNecronsett River!"

The mania which had haunted earlier generations of her family looked outluridly from her eyes. 

I felt the goose-flesh stand out on my arms, and even Jombatiste's hotblood was cooled. He stood silent an instant. 

Cousin Tryphena slammed the door in his face. 

He turned to me with a bewilderment almost pathetic so tremendous wasit--"Did you hear that . . . What sort of logic do you call--"

"Jombatiste, " I counseled him, "if you take my advice you'll leave MissTryphena alone after this. "

Cousin Tryphena started off on her crack-brained expedition, the very nextmorning, on the six-thirty train. I happened to be looking out sleepilyand saw her trudging wearily past our house in the bleak gray of ourmountain dawn, the inadequate little, yellow flame of her old fashionedlantern like a glowworm at her side. It seemed somehow symbolical ofsomething, I did not know what. 

It was a full week before we heard from her, and we had begun really tofear that we would never see her again, thinking that perhaps, while shewas among strangers, her unsettled mind might have taken some new fancywhich would be her destruction. 

That week Jombatiste shut the door to his house. The children reportedthat he would not even let them in, and that they could see him throughthe window stitching away in ominous silence, muttering to himself. 

Eight days after Cousin Tryphena had gone away, I had a telegram from her, which read, "Build fires in both my stoves to-morrow afternoon. "

The dark comes early in the mountains, and so, although I dare say therewas not a house in the village without a face at the pane after the lateevening train came up, none of us saw anything but our usual impenetrableDecember darkness. That, too, seemed, to my perhaps overwroughtconsciousness of the problem, highly suggestive of the usual course of ourlives. At least, I told myself, Cousin Tryphena had taken her absurdlittle lantern and gone forth. 

The next morning, soon after breakfast, I set off for the other end of thestreet. Cousin Tryphena saw me coming and opened the door. She did notsmile, and she was still very pale, but I saw that she had regained herself-control, "Come right in, " she said, in rather a tense voice, and, asI entered she added, in our rustic phrase for introduction, "Make you'quainted with my friend, Mrs. Lindstrom. She's come up from the city tostay with me. And this is her little boy, Sigurd, and this is the baby. "

Blinking somewhat, I shook hands with a small, stoop-shouldered woman, ina new, ready-made dress, with abundant yellow hair drawn back from thethinnest, palest, saddest little face I had ever seen. She was holding animmaculately clean baby, asleep, its long golden lashes lying on cheeks aswhite and sunken as her own. A sturdily built boy of about six scrambledup from where he lay on the floor, playing with the cat, and gave me ahand shyly, hanging down his head. His mother had glanced up at me with aquick, shrinking look of fright, the tears starting to her eyes. 

Cousin Tryphena was evidently afraid that I would not take her cue andsound the right note, for she went on hastily, "Mrs. Lindstrom has beenreal sick and kind o' worried over the baby, so's she's some nervous. Itell her Hillsboro air is thought very good for people's nerves. Lots ofcity folks come here in summer time, just for that. Don't you think Sigurdis a real big boy for only six and a half? He knows his letters too! He'sgoin' to school as soon as we get settled down. I want you should bringover those alphabet blocks that your Peggy doesn't use any more--"

The other woman was openly crying now, clinging to her benefactress' handand holding it against her cheek as she sobbed. 

My heroic old cousin patted her hair awkwardly, but kept on talking in hermatter-of-fact manner, looking at me sternly as though defying me to show, by look or word, any consciousness of anything unusual in the situation;and we fell at once, she and I, into a commonplace conversation about theincidents of the trip up. 

When I came away, half an hour later, Cousin Tryphena slipped a shawl overher head and came down the walk with me to the gate. I was much affectedby what seemed to me the dramatically fitting outcome of my oldkinswoman's Quixotism. I saw Cousin Tryphena picturesquely as the HappyFool of old folk-lore, the character who, through his very lack of worldlywisdom, attains without effort all that self-seeking folks try for invain. The happy ending of her adventure filled me with a cheerful wonderat the ways of Providence, which I tried to pass on to her in theexclamation, "Why, Cousin Tryphena, it's like a story-book? You're goingto _enjoy_ having those people. The woman is as nice as she can be, andthat's the brightest little boy! He's as smart as a whip!"

I was aware that the oddness of Cousin Tryphena's manner still persistedeven now that we were alone. She sighed heavily and said, "I don't sleepmuch better nights now I've done it!" Then facing me, "I hadn't ought tohave brought them up here! I just did it to please myself! Once I saw'em . . . I wanted 'em!"

This seemed to me the wildest possible perversion of the Puritan instinctfor self-condemnation and, half-vexed, I attempted some expostulation. 

She stopped me with a look and gesture Dante might have had, "You ain'tseen what I've seen. "

I was half-frightened by her expression but tried to speak coolly. "Why, was it as bad as that paper said?" I asked. 

She laid her hand on my arm, "Child, it was nothing like what the papersaid. . . It was so much worse!"

"Oh . . . " I commented inadequately. 

"I was five days looking for her. . . They'd moved from the address the papergive. And, in those five days, I saw so many others. . . _so many others_. . . "her face twitched. She put one lean old hand before her eyes. Then, quiteunexpectedly, she cast out at me an exclamation which made my notion ofthe pretty picturesqueness of her adventure seem cheap and trivial andsuperficial. "Jombatiste is right!" she cried to me with a bitterfierceness: "Everything is wrong! Everything is wrong! If I can doanything, I'd ought to do it to help them as want to smash everything upand start over! What good does it do for me to bring up here just thesethree out of all I saw . . . " Her voice broke into pitiful, self-excusingquavers, "but when I saw them . . . The baby was so sick . . . And littleSigurd is so cunning . . . He took to me right away, came to me the firstthing . . . This morning he wouldn't pick up his new rubbers off the floorfor his mother, but, when I asked him, he did, right off . . . You ought tohave seen what he had on . . . Such rags . . . Such dirt . . . And 'twan't herfault either! She's . . . Why she's like anybody . . . Like a person's cousinthey never happened to see before . . . Why, they were all _folks_!" shecried out, her tired old mind wandering fitfully from one thing toanother. 

"You didn't find the little boy in the asylum?" I asked. 

"He was dead before I got there, " she answered. 

"Oh . . . !" I said again, shocked, and then tentatively, "Had he . . . ?"

"I don't know whether he had or not, " said Cousin Tryphena, "I didn't ask. I didn't want to know. I know too much now!" She looked up fixedly at themountain line, high and keen against the winter sky. "Jombatiste isright, " she said again unsparingly, "I hadn't ought to be enjoyingthem . . . Their father ought to be alive and with them. He was willing towork all he could, and yet he . . . Here I've lived for fifty-five years andnever airned my salt a single day. What was I livin' on? The stuff thesefolks ought to ha' had to eat . . . Them and the Lord only knows how manymore besides! Jombatiste is right . . . What I'm doin' now is only a drop inthe bucket!"

She started from her somber reverie at the sound of a childish wail fromthe house. . . . "That's Sigurd . . . I _knew_ that cat would scratch him!" shetold me with instant, breathless agitation, as though the skies werefalling, and darted back. After a moment's hesitation I too, went back andwatched her bind up with stiff, unaccustomed old fingers the littlescratched hand, watched the frightened little boy sob himself quiet on herold knees that had never before known a child's soft weight saw theexpression in her eyes as she looked down at the sleeping baby and gazedabout the untidy room so full of mire, which had always been so orderlyand so empty. 

She lifted the little boy up higher so that his tousled yellow hair restedagainst her bosom. He put an arm around her neck and she flushed withpleasure like a girl; but, although she held him close to her with asudden wistful tenderness, there was in her eyes a gloomy austerity whichforbade me to sentimentalize over the picture she made. 

"But, Cousin Tryphena, " I urged, "it _is_ a drop in the bucket, you know, and that's something!"

She looked down at the child on her knee, she laid her cheek against hisbright hair, but she told me with harsh, self-accusing rigor, "Tain'tright for me to be here alive enjoying that dead man's little boy. "

 * * * * *

That was eighteen months ago. Mrs. Lindstrom is dead of consumption; butthe two children are rosy and hearty and not to be distinguished from theother little Yankees of the village. They are devotedly attached to theirAunt Tryphena and rule her despotically. 

And so we live along, like a symbol of the great world, bewildered CousinTryphena toiling lovingly for her adopted children, with the memory of herdescent into hell still darkening and confusing her kind eyes; Jomatisteclothing his old body in rags and his soul in flaming indignation as hebatters hopefully at the ramparts of intrenched unrighteousness . . . Andthe rest of us doing nothing at all. 

THE GOLDEN TONGUE OF IRELAND

 Tongue of spice and salt and wine and honey, Magic, mystic, sweet, intemperate tongue! Flower of lavish love and lyric fury, Mixed on lips forever rash and young, Wildly droll and quaintly tender;--

 Hark, the hidden melodies of Elfland In the under, in the over tone; Clear faint wailing of the far-heard banshee, Out of lands where never the sun shone, Calling doom on chieftains dying. . . . 

PIPER TIM

I

When Moira O'Donnell was born, Timothy Moran was thirty-three years old, afaëry number, as he often told himself afterward. When he was forty andshe was seven, another mystic number, he dedicated his life to her and shegave him back his lost kingdom of enchantment. It was on the evening ofher seventh birthday that she led him to the Land of Heart's Desire hethought he had left forever in green and desolate Donegal, and herbirthday fell on the seventh of October, and October is the month when thelittle people are busiest. He never forgot what she did for him thatevening, although her part in it was so brief. 

His own birthday was on the thirteenth of the month, and he often laid hissorrows to that unchancy date. On the seventh he sat on the old RoundStone, his pipes lying silent beside him, and brooded on his heavy ill. Father Delancey had just left him and had told him flatly that he had noills at all. Hence he sat, his heart heavier than ever, drooping, underthe great maple tree, the road white before him, leading away into theempty, half-translucent shadows of starlight. Father Delancey had said itwas only the faëry nonsense in his head that made him miserable, and hadmarshaled before him the irrefutable blessings of his life. Had he notbeen cared for from the first minute of his landing from Ireland, apenniless piper of nineteen, as though the holy saints themselves wereabout him? Had he not gone direct to Father Delancey, sent by the priestin Donegal, and had not Father Delancey at once placed him in the Wilcoxfamily, kindliest, heartiest, and most stirring of New England farmers?And had he not lived in prosperity with them ever since?

Timothy started at the faëry number. "Twinty-one years? So 'tis, Father--an' more! 'Tis twinty-one years to-day since I came, aven andtrue--the seventh day of October. Sure, somethin' ought to happen on sucha day--oughtn't it?"

"Happen?" queried Father Delancey. 

"The seventh day of October, the twinty-first year and October bein' themonth for thim, " said Timothy, elucidating confidently. 

Father Delancey frowned and broke into an angry exclamation, "'Tis simplemad ye are, Timothy Moran, with your faëry foolishness, and I've a half amind to take your pipes away from you as a penance for your ignorantsuperstition!"

"But, Father, I'm the seventh son and sure ye must admit 'tis a lonesomecountry, all this, that looks so like Donegal and Killarney mountains, an'is so dead-like, wi' no little people to fill up the big gap between thedead an' the livin', an' the good an' the bad. 'Tis empty, all thisvalley. "

"Timothy Moran, that are my sister's husband's cousin's son, I'm ashamedof ye, an' I bid ye note that 'twas the hand of the Blessed Virgin herselfthat sent ye out o' Ireland, for if you'd 'a' stayed in th' ould countryyou'd 'a' been bewitched long before now--not, savin' us all th' blessedsaints, that I belave in any of your nonsense!"

Timothy smiled at this with an innocent malice. "You see how 'tis, Father. You cannot kape yourself from belivin' in thim and you a man o' God. "

"I do _not_, Timothy! Tis but a way of speech that I learned in mychildhood. An' 'tis lucky for you that I have a knowledge of thim, for anyother priest would have driven you out of the parish, you and yourstubborn pipes that do naught but play faëry music. An' you a man of fortyin a trifle of six days, and no wife an' childer to keep you from foolishnotions. If ye had, now, you could be livin' in the proper tenant's housefor the Wilcox's man, instead of Michael O'Donnell, who has no businesslivin' up here on the hill so far from his work that he can come home butonce a week to look after his poor motherless child. I will say for you, Tim, that you do your duty by that bit of a slip of a girl baby, keepin'her so neat and clean an' all, times when Mike's not here. "

Timothy did not raise his drooping head at this praise, and somethingabout his attitude struck sharp across the priest's trained observation. The big, shambling, red-headed man looked like a guilty child. There was amoment's silence, while Father Delancey speculated, and then hisexperienced instinct sped him to the bull's-eye. "Timothy Moran, you'renot putting your foolish notions in the head of that innocent child o'God, Moira O'Donnell, are you?"

The red head sank lower. 

"Answer me, man! Are ye fillin' her mind with your sidhe[A] and yourred-hatted little people an' your stories of 'gentle places' an' theleprechaun?"

[Footnote A: Pronounced _shee_ (as in Banshee), the fairies. ]

Timothy arose suddenly and flung his long arms abroad in a gesture ofrevolt. "I am that, Father Delancey, 'tis th' only comfort of my life, livin' it, as I do, in a dead country--a valley where folks have lived anddied for two hundred years such lumps of clay that they niver had wan mansharp enough to see the counts in between heaven and earth. " He lapsedagain into his listless position on the Round Stone. "But ye needn't bea-fearin' for her soul, Father--her wid th' black hair an' the big grayeyes like wan that cud see thim if she wud! She's as dead a lump as annyof th' rest--as thim meat-eatin' Protestants, the Wilcoxes, heaven savethe kindly bodies, for they've no souls at all, at all. " From the stone hepicked up a curiously shaped willow whistle with white lines carved on itin an odd criss-cross pattern. "To-day's her seventh birthday, an' Ishowed her how to make the cruachan whistle, an' when I'd finished sheblew on it a loud note that wud ha' wakened the sidhe for miles around inDonegal. An' then she looked at me as dumb as a fish, her big gray eyesblank as a plowed field wid nothin' sown in it. She niver has a word toshow that she _hears_ me, even, when I tell o' the gentle people. " Headded in a whisper to himself, "But maybe she's only waiting. "

"'Tis the Virgin protectin' her from yer foolishness, Tim, " returned thepriest, rising with a relieved air. "She'll soon be goin' to districtschool along with all the other hard-headed little Yankees, and then yourtales can't give her notions. " With which triumphant meditation he walkedbriskly away, leaving Timothy to sit alone with his pipes under themaple-tree, flaming with a still heat of burning autumn red, like a faëryfire. 

His head sank heavily in his hands as his heart grew intolerably sad withthe lack he felt in all the world, most of all in himself. He had oftentried to tell himself what made the world so dully repellant, but he nevercould get beyond, "'Tis as though I was aslape an' yet not quiteaslape--just half wakin', an' somethin' lovely is goin' on in the nextroom, an' I can't wake up to see what 'tis. The trouble's with th' people. They're all _dead_ aslape here, an' there's nobody to wake me up. "

"Piper Tim! Piper Tim!" was breathed close to his ear. He sprang up, withwide, startled eyes. 

"Piper Tim, " said the little girl gravely, "_I've seen them_. "

The man stared at her in a breathless silence. 

"A little wee woman with a red hat and kerchief around her neck, an' shesaid, 'Go straight to Piper Tim an' tell him to play "The Call o' theSidhe" as he sits on the Round Stone, for this is th' day of the CruachanWhistle. '"

The child put out her hand, and drew him to the pipes, still keeping herdeep eyes fixed on him, "Play, Piper Tim, an' shut your eyes an' I'll seewhat you should see an' tell you what 'tis. "

The first notes were quavering as the man's big frame shook, but thelittle hands across his eyes seemed to steady him, and the final flourishwas like a call of triumph. In the silence which followed the child spokein her high little treble with a grave elation. "They're here, Piper Tim, all the river fog in the valley is full of them, dancin' and singin' sogay-like to cheer up the poor hills. An' whist! Here they come up theroad, troops and troops of them, all so bright in the ferlie green; an'sure, " with a little catch of merriment, "sure, they've no toes on theirfeet at all! They've danced them all away. And now, Piper Tim, hold yourbreath, for they'll be after comin' by, but all so still, so still! so youwon't hear them and maybe think to open your eyes and see them--for that'ud mean--sh! sh! Piper Tim, don't stir! _They're here! They're here_!"

His eyes ached with the pressure of the strong little hands across them, his ears ached with straining them into the silence which lay about them. His heart beat fast with hope and then with certainty. Yes, it was nolonger the thin, dead silence of the New England woods he knew sounhappily well. It was the still that comes with activity suspended. Itwas like the quivering quiet of a dancer, suddenly stricken motionless tolisten for the sound of intruding footsteps. There was not the faintestsound, but the silence was full of that rich consciousness of life whichmarks the first awakening of a profound sleeper. 

The hands were withdrawn from before his eyes, but he did not open them. He reached blindly for his pipes, and played "The Song of Angus to theStars, " tears of joy running from between his closed eyelids, to recognizein his own music the quality he had been starving for; the sense of thefutile, poignant beauty, of the lovely and harmless tragedy, of the sweet, moving, gay sad meaning of things. 

When he looked about him he was quite alone. Moira was gone, and the roadlay white and still before him. 

II

He did not see her all the next day, although he went down to the littlehouse to do the household tasks his big hands performed with so curious askill. He wished to see her and clear his mind of a weight which themorning's light had put upon him; but she did not come in answer to hiscall. The little house seemed full of her in its apparent emptiness, andseveral times he had swung sharply about, feeling her back of him, butalways the room had turned a blank face. 

That evening he was returning late from the upland pastures where he hadbeen searching vainly for a lost cow. His path lay through a thick copseof maple saplings where it was quite dark. As he emerged into a stonypasture, he saw the child standing still in the center of a ring of fern, brown and crumpled by the early frosts. When he appeared she held himmotionless by the sudden passion of her gestured appeal for silence. Shedid not stir after this, her hands laid along her cheeks as though to holdher head quite still, her eyes directed with a smiling eagerness toward ahuge rock, looming dimly in the transparent twilight. The silence wasoppressive. Timothy's blood ran chill as the expectancy grew more and morestrained in the child's eyes. He did not dare look at the rock himself. He stared only at the elfin creature before him, and when her hands werefinally flung out in a gesture of welcoming ardor, he broke the unearthlysilence by crying out loud in a rapid whirl, "God save us. Christ save us!The Holy Virgin guard us! St. Patrick defend us! St. Columba--"

The little girl burst into a storm of tears and sank down on the ferns. Timothy stopped his hysterical litany and ran toward her. "Don't you comea-near me, bad Piper Tim!" she sobbed. "You don't dare step on the magiccircle anyhow. It 'ud burn your wicked foot!"

The big farm laborer drew back in a terror he instantly disguised. "I wasjust lookin' for you, Moira aroon, " he said propitiatingly. "I was wishin'to tell you--to tell you--why, that it's all pretend. There aren't anylittle people really, you know. Tis just old Tim's nonsense. " He shiveredat the blasphemy and crossed himself. "Or, if there are any, 'tis only inth' ould country. " The child rose to her feet, eying him strangely, hereyes like deep pools. 

He went on conscientiously, with a mental eye on Father Delancey, "An' ifthere _are_ any, which they aren't, they're bad things for Christians tohave aught to do with, because they know neither right nor wrong, and'tisn't fit that mortals should iver be light an' gay wi' that burdengone! So they're bad for us--an' we shouldn't think of thim, and justcross ourselves wheniver--"

The unspoken protest in the child's face was grown so passionate that heinterrupted himself to answer it in a burst of sympathy. "Och, Moira, acushla, sure an' I know how 'tis to ye--" And then with a reaction tovirtue, he said sternly, "An' if they're not bad, why do they go when youcall on the blessed saints?"

At this the child's face twisted again for tears. "Och, bad Piper Tim, toscare them away from me! It's not that they're bad--only that good's tooheavy for them. They're such _little_ people! It's too heavy! It's tooheavy. " She ran away through the dusk, sobbing and calling this over hershoulder reproachfully. 

In the weeks which followed, old Timothy Moran, as he was called, couldscarcely complain that he was but half awake. He seemed to be making upfor the dull apathy of his long exile by the storminess of his days andnights. Mrs. Wilcox, bustling housewife, hastening about the kitchen, engaged in some late evening task, was moved to a sudden burst ofhysterical tears, by the faint sound of Tim's pipes, dropping down to herfrom the Round Stone in a whirling roulade of ever-ascending merriness. "You, Ralph!" she cried angrily through her sobs, to her oldest boy, stricken open-mouthed and silent by his mother's amazing outburst, "you, Ralph, run up to the Round Stone and tell the Irishman to stop playingthat jig over and over. I'm that tired to-night it drives me wild withnerves!" As she brushed away the tears she said fretfully, "My sakes!When my liver gets to tormenting me so I have the megrims like a girl, it's time to do something. "

The boy came back to say that Old Tim had stopped playing "the jig" beforehe reached him, and was lying sobbing on the stone. 

Moira was as approachable as a barn swallow, swooping into the house for amouthful of food and off again to the sky apparently. Timothy'schild-heart was guiltily heavy within him, for all his excitement, andwhen he finally caught her in the pine woods he spoke briefly and firmly, almost like Father Delancey himself. "Moira, Tim was a big fool to tellyou lies. There aren't really any little people. Tis only a way oftalkin'-like, to say how lovely the woods and stars an' all are. "

"Why do you sit on the Round Stone evenings?" asked Moira defiantly. 

"That's just it! I pretend all kind o' things, but it's really because themoon is like gold, and the white fog comes up in puffs like incense in thechurch, an' the valley's all bright wi' lamps like the sky wi' stars. That's all anybody means by fairies--just how lovely things are if we canbut open our eyes to see thim, an' take time from th' ugly business o'livin' to hear thim, and get a place quiet enough to half see whateverything means. I didn't know before, in Ireland, but now I'm like oneborn again to the ferie country, and now I think I know. There aren't anyLittle People really but just in your own head--"

Moira shook off his hand and faced him, laughing mockingly, her dark eyeswide with an elfin merriment. "Are there not, Piper Tim? Are there not?Listen! You'll see!" She held up a tiny forefinger to the great mantowering above her. As he looked down on her, so pixy-like in the twilightof the pines, he felt his flesh creep. She seemed to be waiting forsomething infinitely comic which yet should startle her. She was poised, half turned as though for flight, yet hung so, without a quiver in anendless listening pause. The man tried in vain to remember the name of asingle saint, so held was he by the breathless expectancy in the eyes ofthe little hobgoblin. His nerves gave way with a loud snap when shesuddenly leaped up at him with snapping fingers and some whispered, half-heard exclamation of "_Now! Now_!" and turning he plunged down thehill in panic-stricken flight. And the next day Father Delancey took herdown to the valley to begin her schooling. 

III

Upon her return she had adopted the attitude which she never changedduring all the years until Timothy went away. She would not speak openly, nor allow Tim to discuss "their" existence. "They mind their business andwe should mind ours, " she said, eying him hard; but she made his worldover for him. Every spring she came back from the valley school and everyautumn she went away; and the months in between were golden. AfterTimothy's work was done in the evenings, he left the hot kitchen, redolentof food and fire and kindly human life, took his pipes up on the RoundStone and played one after another of the songs of the sidhe, until thechild's white face shone suddenly from the dusk. 

Then their entertainment varied. Sometimes they sat and watched the whiteriver fog rise toward them, translucent and distant at first, and thenblowing upon them in gusty, impalpable billows. Timothy's tongue wasloosened by the understanding in the little girl's eyes and he poured outto her the wise foolishness of his inconsequent and profound faëry lore. He told her what was in the fog for him, the souls of mountain people longdead, who came back to their home heights thus. He related long tales ofthe doings of the leprechaun, with lovely, irrelevant episodes, and toldher what he thought was their meaning. 

Some nights the moon rode high and the air was clear and those were notthe times for words--only for sitting quite still and playing every air inall the world on the pipes. Moira lay beside him, her strange, wide eyesfixed intently on the road and the shadows until she peopled them almostvisibly to the musician with the folk of his melodies--with Angus, thebeautiful and strong, with Maive, the sad, the happy, with Congal of thefrightful Vision of War, and Mananan, strange wanderer on these mountaintops. 

Sometimes it rained, the long steady downpour of summer nights, and theysat on the steps of Michael O'Donnell's little cabin, Timothy's pipessounding sweet and shrill against the deep note of the rushing rain. Thiswas the time of the wildest stories, when sheltering walls were closeabout them; of newly wed wives carried off by the fairies to live happyalways, always without a moment of pain, and then to perish utterly on theDay of Judgment, like a last year's butterfly, for souls cannot livewithout sorrow; of newly born babes whose souls were carried away by thesidhe because a cock was not killed on the night of their birth, and ofthe mystic meaning of vicarious sacrifice; of people who had lain down tosleep unaware in a fairy ring and were foolish ever afterward--that is, aspeople say, foolish, but really wise, for they saw how things are; ofhomes built unknowingly across a fairy path where the sidhe take theirjourneys, and how ill luck followed the inhabitants until they moved, andof the strange penalties for living out of harmony with the little-knowncurrents of the soul's life; of how blind men see more than others; of howa fool is one whose mind is so cleared of all futile commonplace trafficthat it reflects untroubled and serene the stars and their courses; of howwisdom is folly, and life, death. All these things and many more didTimothy say in words and play in music on his pipes, and to all of themMoira gave her wide comprehending silence. 

The best of all was on evenings when the stars came out first, and then asthe two sat watching them from the Round Stone they suddenly began topale, and the moon flashed into sight, rising swiftly over the mountainMoira called "The Hill o' Delights, " because it was from a wide, whitedoor in it that the rushing, light-footed little people came out everyevening when the twilight fell and the harsh endeavor of human life wasstilled to peace. There was neither talk nor music on those evenings, buta silence full, like the lovely world about them, of unsaid, quiveringjoy. Sometimes Timothy would turn after such a long time of deep andcheering mutual knowledge of how fair were all things, and find Moiraslipped away from beside him; but so impalpable was the companionship shegave him in the strange and sweet confusion of his thoughts that he didnot feel himself alone, though she might be already deep in the pinesbehind him. 

The girl grew taller, but the cool whiteness of her face was untinged byany flush of young maidenhood. At seventeen she was a slender sprite of agirl, to reach whose unearthly aloofness the warm human hands of hercompanions strained unavailing. Each winter she descended to the valleyand to school and church, a silent, remote child, moving like one in adream. And every spring she came back to the hill, to Timothy and hispipes, to the pines and the uplands, to the Round Stone and the white roadin front of it. Ralph Wilcox, hearty, kindly son of his hearty, kindlyparents, tried to speak to her long enough to make her seem real, but shewas rarely in the house except during the day and a half of each week whenher father was there; and on their casual encounters out of doors shemelted from before his eyes like a pixie, knowing the hiding places andturns of his own land better than he. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of herafterward, regarding him steadily and curiously from a nook in a hillside, and once as she darted away she had dropped a handkerchief and turned herhead in time to see him pick it up; but she did not slacken her pace, orspeak to him then or at all. 

She rarely spoke, even to Timothy, but this was no barrier between them. All the winter Timothy lived on the thoughts of the spring, and when thearbutus and Moira came back he poured out to her the strange treasures hehad found in his heart. Scarcely to her, for she only gazed silent at thestars as he talked. Rather she seemed to unlock in him the rich stores ofhis own understanding and emotion. He marveled that he could ever havefound the valley empty. He felt within him a swelling flood, ever renewed, of significance to fill all his world with a sweet and comforting meaning. 

And so his red hair grew threaded with white, and his foolish, idle hearthappier and happier as the years went on. Then, one midwinter day, FatherDelancey climbed the hill to say that Timothy's sister's husband was dead, and that Timothy was sent for to take his place, hold the Nebraska claim, work the land, and be a father to his sister's children. Timothy wasstunned with horror, but the unbending will of the never-contradictedparish priest bore him along without question. 

"Sure, Tim, go! I tell you to! 'Tis the only thing _to_ do! And 'twill bea man's work and earn ye many hours out of purgatory. An' 'twill be grandfor ye, ye that never would have a family o' your own--here's the BlessedVirgin pushin' ye into one, ready-made. 'Twill be the makin' o' ye, 'twillmake ye rale human, an' ye'll have no more time for star-gazin' an' suchfoolishness. Ye can find out what people are in the world for, insteadkeepin' yerself so outside o' things. Sure, yes, man, yes, I'll tell Moiraye said good-by to her, an'--yes, I give ye my word, and promise true andtrue, I'll lave ye now if she moves away or if any harm comes to her. "

IV

His grizzled hair was turned quite white when his sister kissed himgood-by, fresh tears in her eyes, scarcely dry from the excitement of heryoungest daughter's wedding. She had a moment of divination like his, andsaid sadly, "There's no use trying to thank ye, Timmy, words can't do it. If ye'd been anybody else, I cud ha' said ye got ye'r pay for all theselong, hard years in the love the childer bear ye. That's the pay folks getfor workin' an' livin' for others--but ye're not folks. Is't that ye'rethe seventh son? Is't that ye've second sight? Is't that--_what_ is't thatmakes ye so far away? An' what _is_ ye'r pay, Tim? Now that it's over andthe children all safe and grown up, ye look yerself like a child that'sdone its lesson an' run out to play. Is't all just work or play with ye?Can't ye niver just _live_?"

In truth her brother's eagerness to be away was scarcely concealed at allfrom the grateful, wistful Irish eyes about him. He was breathless withhaste to be off. The long trip to New England was a never-ending nightmareof delay to him, and although he had planned for years to walk up thehill, his trembling old legs dragged in a slow progress maddening to hisimpatience. A farmer, driving by, offered him a lift, which he acceptedgratefully, sitting strained far forward on the high seat. At a turn ofthe road he looked back and saw that he had passed the cluster of pineswhere Moira had laughed at him, and where he had felt so thick about himthe thronging rush of his newly awakened perceptions of the finer meaningof things, the gay, sweet crowd of gentle little people. 

He stopped the farmer and, leaping down from the high seat, he took hispipes under his arm and fairly ran up the little path. His rheumatic kneecreaked a little, but the color came up hard in his tired old face as thetwilight of the pines and their pungent, welcoming breath fell about him. He cast him down and buried his face in the rust-red dried needles. He didnot weep, but from time to time a long sigh heaved his shoulders. Then heturned over and lay on his back, looking at the sunset-yellow sky throughthe green, thick-clustered needles, noticing how the light made each oneglisten as though dipped in molten gold. His hand strayed out to hispipes, lying beside him with mute, gaping mouths. "The Gold o' theGlamour, " he murmured to himself, and as he broke the silence with the oldtune faintly blown, he felt the wood peopled about him as of yore withtwilight forms. Unseen bright eyes gazed at him from behind tree-trunks, and the branches were populous with invisible, kindly listeners. The veryhush was symbolic of the consciousness of the wood that he was thereagain. There was none of the careless commonplace of rustling leaves, andsnapping twigs, and indifferent, fearless bird-song. In the death-likestill he felt life quivering and observant with a thousand innocent, curious, welcoming eyes. 

When he had quavered through the last note he let the pipes fall and gazedabout him with a smile, like a happy old child. The sun sank behind themountain as he looked, and he pulled himself heavily up. His way to thefarm lay over bare upland pastures where his feet, accustomed for years tothe yielding prarie levels, stumbled and tripped among the loose stones. Twilight came on rapidly, so that he found himself several times walkingblindly through fairy rings of fern. He crossed himself and bowed his headthree times to the west, where the evening star now shone pale in theradiance of the glowing sky. Between two of the ridges he wandered into abog where his feet, hot in their heavy boots, felt gratefully the oozing, cool brown water. 

And then, as he stepped into the lane, dark with dense maple-trees andechoing faintly with the notes of the hermit thrush, he saw the light ofthe little house glimmer through the trees in so exactly the spot wherehis hungering eyes sought it that his heart gave a great hammering leap inhis breast. 

He knocked at the door, half doubtfully, for all his eagerness. It mightbe she lived elsewhere in the parish now. He had schooled himself to thisthought so that it was no surprise, although a heavy disappointment, whenthe door was opened by a small dark man holding a sleeping baby on hisarm. Timothy lowered his voice and the man gave a brief and hushed answer. He spoke in a strong French-Canadian accent. "Moira O'Donnell? I nevaireheard before. Go to ze house on ze hill--mebbe zey know--"

He closed the door, and, through the open window, Timothy saw him sitdown, still holding the baby and looking at it as though the interruptingepisode were already forgotten. The old man shivered with a passing eeriesense of being like a ghost knocking vainly at the doors of the living. Helimped up the hill, and knocked on the kitchen door of the old Wilcoxhouse. To his eyes, dilated with the wide dusk of the early evening, thewindows seemed to blaze with light, and when the door was opened to him heshaded his eyes, blinking fast against the rays of a lamp held high in thehand of a round, little woman who looked at him with an impersonalkindness. His heart beat so he could not speak. 

Suddenly from the past rang out his old name, the one he had almost lostin the dreary years of "Uncle Tim" which lay behind him. 

"Why, Piper Tim!" cried the woman in a voice of exceeding warmth andaffection. "Why, it's dear, dear, darling old Piper Tim come back to visithis old home. I knew ye in a minute by the pipes. Come in! Come in!There's not a soul livin' or dead that's welcomer in th' house of MoiraWilcox. "

The name blazed high through all the confusion of his swimming senses. Tohis blank look she returned a mellow laugh. "Why sure, Timmy darlint, hasn't anybody; iver told ye I was married? I'd have written ye myself, only that I knew you couldn't read it, and 'twas hard to tell throughother people. Though, saints preserve us, 'tis long since I thoughtanything about it, one way _or_ th' other. 'Tis as nat'ral as breathingnow. "

She was pulling him into the warm, light room, taking his cap and pipesfrom him, and at the last she pushed him affectionately into a chair, andstood looking kindly at his pale agitation, her arms wide in a soft angleas she placed her hands on her rounded hips. "Oh, Timothy Moran, youdarlint! Moira's that glad to see you! You mind me of the times when I wasyoung and that's comin' to be long ago. "

She turned and stepped hastily to the stove from which rose an appetizingsmell of frying ham. As she bent her plump, flushed face over this, thedoor opened and two dark-eyed little girls darted in. On seeing astranger, they were frozen in mid-flight with the shy gaze of countrychildren. 

"Here, childer, 'tis Piper Tim come back to visit us. Piper Tim that I'vetold ye so many tales about--an' the gran' tunes he can play on his pipes. He can play with ye better nor I--he niver has aught else to do!" Shesmiled a wide, friendly smile on the old man as she said this, to show shemeant no harm, and turned the slices of ham deftly so that they sent apuff of blue savory smoke up to her face. "Don't th' ham smell good, yespalpeens, fresh from runnin' th' hills? Go an' wash ye'r faces an' handsand call ye'r father an' brothers. I've four, " she added proudly to theman by the table watching her with horrified eyes. 

The fumes of the cooking made him sick, the close air suffocated him. Hefelt as though he were in some oppressive nightmare, and the talk at thesupper-table penetrated but dully to his mind. The cordiality of Moira'shusband, the shy, curious looks of the children at his pipes, even Moira'sface rosy from brow to rounded chin, and beaming with indulgent, affectionate interest all melted together into a sort of indistinguishableconfusion. This dull distress was rendered acute anguish by Moira's talk. In that hot, indoor place, with all those ignorant blank faces about her, she spoke of the pines and the upland bogs, of the fog and the RoundStone, and desecrated a sacred thing with every word. 

It would have been a comfort to him if she had even talked with anapostate's yearning bitterness for his betrayed religion, if she hadspoken harshly of their old, sweet folly; but she was all kindness andeager, willing reminiscence. Just as she spoke his name, his faëry name of"Piper Tim, " in a tone that made it worse than "Uncle Tim, " so sheblighted one after another of the old memories as she held them up in herfirm, assured hands, and laughed gently at their oddity. 

After supper as Tim sat again in the kitchen watching her do the eveningwork, the tides of revulsion rose strong within him. "We were a queer lot, an' no mistake, Piper Tim, " she said, scraping at a frying pan with avigorous knife. "An' the childer are just like us. I've thried to tellthem some of our old tales, but--I dun'no'--they've kind o' gone from me, now I've such a lot to do. I suppose you were up to the same always, withyour nephews an' nieces out West. 'Twas fine for ye to have a family ofyour own that way, you that was always so lonely like. "

Timothy's shuddering horror of protest rose into words at this, incoherentwords and bursts of indignation that took his breath away in gasps. "Moira! _Moira_! What are ye sayin' to me? _Me_ wid a family! Anyone who'siver had th' quiet to listen to th' blessed little people--_him_ to fillup his ears wid th' clatter of mortial tongues. No? Since I lift here I'vehad no minute o' peace--oh, Moira, th' country there--th' great flathidjious country of thim--an' th' people like it--flat an' fruitful. An'oh, Moira, aroon, it's my heart breakin' in me, that now I've worked andworked there and done my mortial task an' had my purgatory before my time, an' I've come back to live again--that ye've no single welcomin' word tobid me stay. "

The loving Irish heart of the woman melted in a misunderstanding sympathyand remorse. "Why, poor Piper Tim, I didn't mean ye should go back to themor their country if ye like it better here. Ye're welcome every day of theyear from now till judgment tramp. I only meant--why--seem' they were yourown folks--and all, that ye'd sort o' taken to thim--the way most do, whenit's their own blood. "

She flowed on in a stream of fumbling, warm-hearted, mistaken apologythat sickened the old man's soul. When he finally rose for his greatadventure, he spoke timidly, with a wretched foreknowledge of what heranswer would be. 

"Och, Piper Tim, 'tis real sweet of ye to think of it and ask me, an' I'dlike fine to go. Sure, I've not been on the Round Stone of anevening--why, not since you went away I do believe! But Ralph's goin' tothe grange meetin' to-night, an' one of th' childer is restless with acough, and I think I'll not go. My feet get sort of sore-like, too, afterbein' on them all day. "

V. 

As he stepped out from the warm, brightly lighted room, the night seemedchill and black, but after a moment his eyes dilated and he saw the starsshining through the densely hanging maple leaves. 

Up by the Round Stone the valley opened out beneath him. Restlessly helooked up and down the road and across the valley with a questing glancewhich did not show him what he sought. The night for all its dark cornershad nothing in it for him beyond what lay openly before him. He put outhis hand instinctively for his pipes, remembered that he had left them atthe house, and sprang to his feet to return for them. Perhaps Moira wouldcome out with him now. Perhaps the child had gone to sleep. The brief stayin the ample twilight of the hillside had given him a faint, momentarycourage to appeal again to her against the narrow brightness of herprison. 

Moira sat by the kitchen table, sewing, her smooth round face bloominglike a rose in the light from the open door of the stove. Her kindly eyesbeamed sweetly on the old man. "Ah, Piper Tim, ye're wise. 'Tis a dampnight out for ye'r rheumatis. The fog risin' too, likely?"

The old piper went to her chair and stood looking at her with a fixedgaze, "Moira!" he said vehemently, "Moira O'Donnell that was, the starsare bright over the Round Stone, an' th' moon is risin' behind th' Hill o'Delights, and the first white puffs of incense are risin' from th'whirl-hole of th' river. I've come back for my pipes, and I'm goin' out toplay to th' little people--an' oh, shall old Piper Tim go without Moira?"

He spoke with a glowing fervor like the leaping up of a dying candle. Fromthe inexorably kind woman who smiled so friendly on him his heart recoiledand puffed itself out into darkness. She surveyed him with the wise, tender pity of a mother for a foolish, much-loved child. "Sure, 'tis th'same Piper Tim ye are!" she said cheerfully, laying down her work, "but, Lord save ye, Timmy darlint, _Moira's grown up_! There's no need for mypretendin' to play any more, is there, when I've got proper childer o' myown to keep it up. _They_ are my little people--an' I don't have to have aquiet place to fancy them up out o' nothin'. They're real! An' they'retakin' my place all over again. There's one--the youngest girl--the onethat looks so like me as ye noticed--she's just such a one as I was. To-day only (she's seven to-morrow), she minded me of some old tales I hadtold her about the cruachan whistle for the sidhe on the seventh birthday, an' she'd been tryin' to make one, but I'd clean forgot how thecriss-cross lines go. It made me think back on that evening when I wasseven--maybe you've forgot, but you was sittin' on the Round Stone inth'----"

Timothy's sore heart rebelled at this last rifling of the shrine, and hemade for the door. Moira's sweet solicitude held him for an instant incheck. "Oh, Tim, ye'd best stay in an' warm your knee by the good fire. I've a pile of mendin' to do, and you'll tell me all about your family inth' West and how you farmed there. It'll be real cozy-like. "

Timothy uttered an outraged sound and snatching up his pipes fled out ofthe pleasant, low-ceilinged room, up the road, now white as chalk beneaththe newly risen moon. At the Round Stone he sat down and, putting hispipes to his lips, he played resolutely through to the end "The Song ofAngus to the Stars. " As the last, high, confident note died, he put hispipes down hastily, and dropped his face in his hands with a broken murmurof Gaelic lament. 

When he looked abroad again, the valley was like a great opal, where themoon shot its rays into the transparent fog far below him. The road waswhite and the shadows black and one was no more devoid of mystery than theother. 

The sky for all its stars hung above the valley like an empty bowl abovean empty vessel, and in his heart he felt no swelling possibilities tofill this void. To the haggard old eyes the face of the world was like adead thing, which did not return his gaze even with hostility, butblankly--a smooth, thin mask which hid behind it nothing at all. 

He was startled by the sudden appearance of a dog from out of the shadows, a shaggy collie who trotted briskly down the road, stopping to roll afriendly, inquiring eye on his bent figure. His eyes followed the animaluntil it vanished in the shadows on the other side. After the sound of itspadding footsteps was still, the old man's heart died within him at thesilence. 

He tried vainly to exorcise this anguish by naming it What was it? Why didhe droop dully now that he was where he had so longed to be? Everythingwas as it had been, the valley, the clean white fog, tossing its waves upto him as he had dreamed of it in the arid days of Nebraska; the mountainsclosing in on him with the line of drooping peace he had never lost frombefore his eyes during the long, dreary years of exile. Only he waschanged. His eye fell on his mud-caked boots, and his face contracted. "Oh, my! Oh, my!" he said aloud, like an anxious old child. "She couldn'tha' liked my tracking bog durt on to her clane kitchen floor!"

But as he sat brooding, his hand dropped heavily to the Round Stone andencountered a small object which he held up to view. It was a willowwhistle of curious construction, with white lines criss-cross on it; andbeside it lay a jackknife with a broken blade. The old man looked at it, absently at first, then with a start, and finally with a rush of joyfuland exultant exclamations. 

And afterward, quite tranquilly, with a shining face of peace, he playedsoftly on his pipes, "The Call of the Sidhe to the Children. "

ADESTE FIDELES!

I. 

The persuasive agent sought old Miss Abigail out among her flower-beds andheld up to her a tiny chair with roses painted on the back. "I was told tosee you about these. They're only four dollars a dozen, and the smallestschool children love 'em. " Miss Abigail straightened herself withdifficulty. She had been weeding the gladiolus bed. "Four dollars, " shemused, "I was going to put four dollars into rose-bushes this fall. " Sheput out a strong, earth-stained old hand and took the chair. Her affectionfor her native Greenford began to rise through her life-long thrift, amental ferment not unusual with her. Finally, "All right, " she said; "send'em to the schoolhouse, and say they're in memory of all my grandfathersand grandmothers that learned their letters in that schoolhouse. "

She went back to her digging and the agent clicked the gate back of hisretreat. Suddenly she stood up without remembering to ease her back. Sheheard the first shot from the enemy who was to advance so rapidly upon herthereafter. "Wait a minute, " she called to the agent. As he paused, shemade a swift calculation. "I don't believe I want a dozen, " she said, muchsurprised. "I can't think of that many little ones. " The agent took hisnotebook. "How many?" he asked. 

The ponderous old woman stared at him absently, while she made a mentalcanvass of the town. She spoke with a gasp. "We don't need any!" shecried. "There ain't a child in school under eleven. "

"Take some now and have them handy, " urged the agent. 

Miss Abigail's gaze again narrowed in silent calculation. When she spokeher exclamation was not for her listener. She had forgotten him. "GoodLord of Love!" she cried. "There ain't a single one comin' up to sit onthose chairs if I should buy 'em!"

The agent was utterly blotted from her mind. She did not know when he lefther garden. She only knew that there were no children in Greenford. Therewere no children in her town! "Why, what's comin' to Greenford!" shecried. 

And yet, even as she cried out, she was aware that she had had a warning, definite, ominous, a few days before, from the lips of Molly Leonard. Atthat time she had put away her startled uneasiness with a masterful hand, burying it resolutely where she had laid away all the other emotions ofher life, under the brown loam of her garden. But it all came back to hernow. 

Her thin, fluttering, little old friend had begun with tragic emphasis, "The roof to the library leaks!"

Miss Abigail had laughed as usual at Molly's habit of taking small eventswith bated breath. "What of it?" she asked. "That roof never was good, even back in the days when 'twas a private house and my great-uncle livedin it. "

Miss Molly fluttered still more before the awfulness of her nextannouncement. 

"Well, the talk is that the town won't vote a cent toward repairs. "

"They'll have to! You can't get along without a library!"

"No, they won't. The talk is that the men won't vote to have the town givea bit of money for shingles. No, nor to pay somebody to take the place ofEllen Monroe as librarian. She's got work in the print mill atJohnsonville and is going to move down there to be near her mother'sfamily. "

"Oh, _talk_!" said Miss Abigail with the easy contempt she had for thingsoutside her garden hedge. "Haven't you heard men talk before?"

"But they say really they _won't!_ They say nobody ever goes into it anymore when the summer folks go away in the autumn. "

Miss Abigail's gesture indicated that the thing was unthinkable. "What'sthe matter with young folks nowadays, anyhow? They always used to runthere and chatter till you couldn't hear yourself think. "

Miss Molly lowered her voice like a person coming to the frighteningclimax of a ghost story. "Miss Abigail, they _ain't_ any young folks hereany more!"

"What do you call the Pitkin girls!" demanded the other. 

"They were the very last ones and they and their mother have decidedthey'll move to Johnsonville this fall. "

Miss Abigail cried out in energetic disapproval, "What in the Lord's worldare the Pitkinses going to move away from Greenford for! They belonghere!"

Miss Molly marshaled the reasons with a sad swiftness, "There aren't anymusic pupils left for the oldest one, the two next have got positions inthe print mill and little Sarah is too old for the school here any more. "

Miss Abigail shook her head impatiently as though to brush away atroublesome gnat. "How about the Leavitts? There ought to be enough youngones in that or family to--"

"They moved to Johnsonville last week, going to rent their house to cityfolks in the summer, the way all the rest here in the street do. Theydidn't want to go a bit. Eliza felt dreadful about it, but what can theydo? Ezra hasn't had enough carpentering to do in the last six months topay their grocery bill, and down in Johnsonville they can't get carpentersenough. Besides, all the children's friends are there, and they got solonesome here winters. "

Miss Abigail quailed a little, but rallying, she brought out, "What's thematter with the Bennetts? The whole kit and b'iling of them came in herethe other day to pester me asking about how I grew my lilies. "

"Why, Miss Abigail! You don't pay any more attention to village news!They've been working in the mills for two years now, and only come homefor two weeks in the summer like everybody else. "

The old woman stirred her weighty person wrathfully. "Like everybody else!Molly, you talk like a fool! As if there was nobody lived here all theyear around!"

"But it's _so!_ I don't know what's coming to Greenford!"

An imperative gesture from the older woman cut her short. "Don't chatterso, Molly! If it's true, that about the library, we've got to dosomething!"

The interview had ended in an agreement from her, after a struggle withthe two passions of her life, to give up the tulip bulbs for which she hadbeen saving so long, and spend the money for repairing the roof. MissMolly, having no money to give, since she was already much poorer than shecould possibly be and live, agreed, according to Miss Abigail's peremptorysuggestion, to give her time, and keep the library open at least duringthe afternoons. 

"You can do it, Molly, as well as not, for you don't seem to have half thesewing you used to. "

"There's nobody here any more to sew _for_--" began the seamstressdespairingly, but Miss Abigail would not listen, bundling her out of thegarden gate and sending her trotting home, cheered unreasonably by the oldwoman's jovial blustering, "No such kind of talk allowed in _my_ garden!"

But now, after the second warning, Miss Abigail felt the need of somecheer for herself as she toiled among the hollyhocks and larkspurs. Shewould not let herself think of the significance of the visit of the agentfor the chairs, and she could not force herself to think of anything else. For several wretched weeks she hung in this limbo. Then, one morning asshe stood gazing at her Speciosums Rubrums without seeing them, shereceived her summons to the front. She had a call from her neighbor, Mr. Edward Horton, whom the rest of the world knows as a sculptor, but whomMiss Abigail esteemed only because of his orthodox ideas on rose culture. He came in to ask some information about a blight on his Red Ramblers, although after Miss Abigail had finished her strong recommendation to usewhale oil soap sprayed, and not hellebore, he still lingered, crushing aleaf of lemon verbena between his fingers and sniffing the resultantperfume with thoughtful appreciation. He was almost as enthusiastic ahorticulturist as Miss Abigail, and stood high in her good graces as oneof the few individuals of sense among the summer colony. She faced himtherefore in a peaceable, friendly mood, glad of the diversion from herthoughts, and quite unprepared for the shock he was about to give her. 

"I'm on my way to interview the trustees of the church, " he remarked. "Itis curious that all but one of them now really live in Johnsonville, although they still keep their nominal residence here. "

"What do you want to see _them_ for?" asked Miss Abigail, with a bluntnesscaused in part by her wincing at his casual statement of an unwelcome fact. 

"Why, I've had what I flatter myself is an inspiration for everyoneconcerned. I've got a big commission for part of the decorations of thenew State House in Montana, and I need a very large studio. It occurred tome the other day that instead of building I'd save time by buying the oldchurch here and using that. "

Miss Abigail leaned against the palings. "_Buy our church!_" she said, andevery letter was a capital. 

"I didn't know you were a member, " said the sculptor, a little surprised. "You don't often go. "

Miss Abigail shouted out, "Why, my grandfather was minister in thatchurch!" Mr. Horton received this as a statement of fact. "Indeed? Ididn't realize the building was so old. I wonder if the foundations arestill in good shape. " He went on, explanatorily, "I really don't know whyI hadn't thought of the plan before. The number who attend church in thatgreat barn of a place could easily be put into someone's parlor, and savethe trustees the expense of heating. One of them whom I saw the other dayseemed quite pleased with the notion--said they'd been at a loss to knowwhat to do about conditions here. " He glanced at his watch. "Well, I mustbe going or I shall miss the train to Johnsonville. Thank you very muchfor the hint about the blight. "

He went down the street, humming a cheerful little tune. 

To Miss Abigail it was the bugle call of "Forward, charge!" She had been, for the last few weeks, a little paler than usual. Now her powerful oldface flushed to an angry red. She dashed her trowel to the garden path andclenched her fists. "What's coming to Greenford!" she shouted. It was nolonger a wail of despair. It was a battle-cry of defiance. 

II

She had no time to organize a campaign, forced as she was to beginfighting at once. Reaching wildly for any weapon at hand, she rushed tothe front, as grim-visaged a warrior as ever frightened a peaceable, shiftless non-combatant "Joel Barney!" she cried, storming up his frontsteps. "You're a trustee of the church, aren't you? Well, if you don'tvote against selling the church, I'll foreclose the mortgage on your houseso quick you can't wink. And you tell 'Lias Bennett that if he doesn't dothe same, I'll pile manure all over that field of mine near his place, andstink out his summer renters so they'll never set foot here again. "

She shifted tactics as she encountered different adversaries and tried noblackmail on stubborn Miles Benton, whom she took pains to see the nexttime he came back to Greenford for a visit. Him she hailed as theNative-Born. "How would you like to have brazen models and nasty statuesmade in the building where your own folks have always gone to church?"

But when the skirmish was over, she realized ruefully that the argumentwhich had brought her her hard-won victory had been the one which, for aperson of such very moderate means as hers, reflected the least hope forfuture battles. At the last, in desperation, she had guaranteed in thename of the Ladies' Aid Society that the church, except for the minister'ssalary, should thereafter be no expense to the trustees. She had inventedthat source of authority, remembering that Molly Leonard had said shebelonged to the Ladies' Aid Society, "and I can make Molly do anything, "she thought, trusting Providence for the management of the others. 

As a matter of fact, when she came to investigate the matter, she foundthat Molly was now the sole remaining member. Her dismay was acute, Molly's finances being only too well known to her, but she ralliedbravely. "They don't do much to a church that costs money, " she thought, and, when Molly went away, she made out her budget unflinchingly. Wood forthe furnace, kerosene for the lamps, wages to the janitor, repairs whenneeded--"Well, Abigail Warner, " she told herself, "it means nothing newbought for the garden, and no new microscope--the roof to the librarycosting more than they said 'twould and all. "

But the joy of triumphant battle was still swelling her doughty old heart, so that even these considerations did not damp her exultation over herartist neighbor the next time he came to see her. He listened to herboasting with his pleasant, philosophic smile, and, when she finished, delivered himself of a quiet little disquisition or the nature of thingswhich was like ice-water in the face of the hot-blooded old fighter. 

"My dear Miss Abigail, your zeal does your heart credit, and yourmanagement of the trustees proves you an unsuspected diplomat; but as afriend, and, believe me, a disinterested friend, let me warn you that youare contending against irresistible forces. You can no more resuscitateyour old Greenford than you can any other dead body. You have kept thechurch from my clutches, it is true, though for that matter I wouldn'thave offered to buy it if I hadn't thought no one cared about it--but whatdo you mean to do with it now you have it? You cannot bring back the oldGreenford families from their well-paid work in Johnsonville to sit inthose rescued pews, or read in your deserted library, or send theirchildren to your empty schoolhouse. You tell me they are loyal to theirold home, and love to come back here for visits. Is that strange?Greenford is a charming village set in the midst of beautiful mountains, and Johnsonville is a raw factory town in a plain. But they cannot live onpicturesque scenery or old associations. The laws of economics are likeall other laws of nature, inevitable in their action and irresistible in--"

Miss Abigail gave the grampus snort which had been her great-grandfather'swar-cry. "Hoo! You're like all other book folks! You give things such longnames you scare yourselves! I haven't got anything to do with economics, nor it with me. It's a plain question as to whether the church myancestors built and worshipped in is to be sold. There's nothing soinevitable in _that_, let me tell you. Laws of nature--fiddlesticks! Howabout the law of gravity? Don't I break that every time I get up gumptionenough to raise my hand to my head!"

Mr. Horton looked at the belligerent old woman with the kindest smile ofcomprehension. "Ah, I know how hard it is for you. In another way I havebeen through the same bitter experience. My home, my real home, where myown people are, is out in a wind-swept little town on the Nebraskaprairies. But I cannot live there because it is too far from my world ofartists and art patrons. I tried it once, but the laws of supply anddemand work for all alike. I gave it up. Here I am, you see. You can'thelp such things. You'd better follow on to Johnsonville now and notembitter the last of your life with a hopeless struggle. "

Miss Abigail fairly shouted at him her repudiation of his ideas. "Notwhile there is a breath in me! My folks were all soldiers. "

"But even soldiers surrender to overpowering forces. "

"Hoo! Hoo! How do they know they're overpowering till they're overpowered!How do they dare surrender till they're dead! How do they know that ifthey hold out just a little longer they won't get reënforcements!"

Mr. Horton was a little impatient of his old friend's unreason. "My dearMiss Abigail, you have brains. _Use_ them! What possible reinforcementscan you expect?"

The old woman opposed to his arguments nothing but a passionately baredenial. "No! No! No! We're different! It's in your blood to give upbecause you can reason it all out that you're beaten, " She stood up, shaking with her vehemence. "It's in my blood to fight and fight andfight--"

"And then what?" asked the sculptor, as she hesitated. 

"Go on fighting!" she cried. 

III

She was seventy-one years old when she first flew this flag, and for thenext four years she battled unceasingly under its bold motto against oddsthat rapidly grew more overwhelming as the process that had beenimperceptibly draining Greenford of its population gained impetus with itown action. In the beginning people moved to Johnsonville because theycould get work in the print mill, but after a time they went because theothers had gone. Before long there was no cobbler in Greenford becausethere was so little cobbling to do. After that the butcher went away, thenthe carpenter, and finally the grocery-store was shut up and deserted bythe man whose father and grandfather had kept store in the same buildingfor sixty years. It was the old story. He had a large family of childrenwho needed education and "a chance. "

The well-kept old village still preserved its outer shell of quaintnessand had a constantly increasing charm for summering strangers who rejoicedwith a shameless egoism in the death-like quiet of the moribund place, andpointed out to visiting friends from the city the tufts of grass beginningto grow in the main street as delightful proofs of the tranquillity oftheir summer retreat. 

Miss Abigail overheard a conversation to this effect one day between someself-invited visitors to her wonderful garden. Her heart burned and herface blackened. "You might as well, " she told them, "laugh at the funnyfaces of a person who's choking to death!"

The urbane city people turned amused and inquiring faces upon her. "Howso?"

"Roads aren't for grass to grow in!" she fulminated. "They're for folks to use, for men and women and little children to go overto and from their homes. "

"Ah, economic conditions, " they began to murmur. "The inevitable laws ofsupply and--"

"Get out of my garden!" Miss Abigail raged at them. "Get out!"

They had scuttled before her, laughing at her quaint verocity, and she hadsworn wrath fully never to let another city dweller inside her gate--aresolution which she was forced to forego as time passed on and she becamemore and more hard pressed for ammunition. 

Up to this time she had lived in perfect satisfaction on seven hundreddollars a year, but now she began to feel straitened. She no longer daredafford even the tiniest expenditure for her garden. She spaded the bedsherself, drew leaf mold from the woods in repeated trips with a child'sexpress wagon, and cut the poles for her sweet-peas with her own hands. When Miss Molly Leonard declared herself on the verge of starvation fromlack of sewing to do, and threatened to move to Johnsonville to be nearher sister Annie, Miss Abigail gave up her "help" and paid Miss Molly forthe time spent in the empty reading-room of the library. But the campaignsoon called for more than economy, even the most rigid. When the ministerhad a call elsewhere, and the trustees of the church seized theopportunity to declare it impossible to appoint his successor, MissAbigail sold her woodlot and arranged through the Home Missionary Boardfor someone to hold services at least once a fortnight. Later the "bigmeadow" so long coveted by a New York family as a building site wassacrificed to fill the empty war chest, and, temporarily in funds, shehired a boy to drive her about the country drumming up a congregation. 

Christmas time was the hardest for her. The traditions of old Greenfordwere for much decorating of the church with ropes of hemlock, and a hugeChristmas tree in the Town Hall with presents for the best of theSunday-school scholars. Winding the ropes had been, of old, work for theyoung unmarried people, laughing and flirting cheerfully. By the promiseof a hot supper, which she furnished herself, Miss Abigail succeeded ingetting a few stragglers from the back hills, but the number grew steadilysmaller year by year. She and Miss Molly always trimmed the Christmas treethemselves. Indeed, it soon became a struggle to pick out any child aregular enough attendant at Sunday-school to be eligible for a present. The time came when Miss Abigail found it difficult to secure any childrenat all for the annual Christmas party. 

The school authorities began to murmur at keeping up the large oldschoolhouse for a handful of pupils. Miss Abigail, at her wit's end, guaranteed the fuel for warming the house, and half the pay of a teacher. Examining, after this, her shrunk and meager resources, she discoveredshe had promised far beyond her means. She was then seventy-three yearsold, but an ageless valor sprang up in her to meet the new emergency. Shefocused her acumen to the burning point and saw that the only way out ofher situation was to earn some money--an impossible thing at her age. Without an instant's pause, "How shall I do it?" she asked herself, andsat frowning into space for a long time. 

When she rose up, the next development in her campaign was planned. Not invain had she listened scornfully to the silly talk of city folks about thepicturesqueness of her old house and garden. It was all grist to her mill, she perceived, and during the next summer it was a grimly amused oldmiller who watched the antics of Abigail Warner, arrayed in apseudo-oldfashioned gown of green-flowered muslin, with a quaintly ruffledcap confining her rebellious white hair, talking the most correctbook-brand of down-east jargon, and selling flowers at twenty times theirvalue to automobile and carriage folk. She did not mind sacrificing herpersonal dignity, but she did blush for her garden, reduced to the mostobvious commonplaces of flowers that any child could grow. But bySeptember she had saved the school-teacher's pay, and the Martins and theAllens, who had been wavering on account of their children, decided tostay another winter at least. 

That was _something_, Miss Abigail thought, that Christmas, as she andMiss Molly tortured their rheumatic limbs to play games with the sixchildren around the tree. She had held rigorously to the old tradition ofhaving the Christmas tree party in the Town Hall, and she had heartenedMiss Molly through the long lonely hours they had spent in trimming it;but as the tiny handful of forlorn celebrants gathered about the talltree, glittering in all the tinsel finery which was left over from thedays when the big hall had rung to the laughter of a hundred children andas many more young people, even Miss Abigail felt a catch in her throat asshe quavered through "King _Will_yum was King _James's_ son!"

When the games were over and the children sat about soberly, eating theirice-cream and cake, she looked over her shoulder into the big empty roomand shivered. The children went away and she and Miss Molly put out thelights in silence. When they came out into the moonlight and looked up anddown the deserted street, lined with darkened houses, the face of theyounger woman was frankly tear-stained. "Oh, Miss Abigail, " she said;"let's give it up!"

Miss Abigail waited an instant, perceptible instant before answering, but, when she did, her voice was full and harsh with its usual vigor. "Fiddlesticks! You must ha' been losing your sleep. Go tuck yourself upand get a good night's rest and you won't talk such kind of talk!"

But she herself sat up late into the night with a pencil and paper, figuring out sums that had impossible answers. 

That March she had a slight stroke of paralysis, and was in an agony ofapprehension lest she should not recover enough to plant the flowers forthe summer's market. By May, flatly against the doctor's orders, she wasdragging herself around the garden on crutches, and she stuck to her post, smiling and making prearranged rustic speeches all the summer. She earnedenough to pay the school-teacher another winter and to buy the fuel forthe schoolhouse, and again the Martins and the Allens stayed over; thoughthey announced with a callous indifference to Miss Abigail's ideas thatthey were going down to Johnsonville at Christmas to visit their relativesthere, and have the children go to the tree the ex-Greenfordites alwaystrimmed. 

When she heard this Miss Abigail set off to the Allen farm on the lowerslope of Hemlock Mountain. "Wa'n't our tree good enough?" she demandedhotly. 

"The _tree_ was all right, " they answered, "but the children were somortal lonesome. Little Katie Ann came home crying. "

Miss Abigail turned away without answering and hobbled off up the roadtoward the mountain. Things were black before her eyes and in her heart asshe went blindly forward where the road led her. She still fought off anyacknowledgment of the bitterness that filled her, but when the road, afterdwindling to a wood trail and then to a path, finally stopped, she satdown with a great swelling breath. "Well, I guess this is the end, " shesaid aloud, instantly thereafter making a pretense to herself that shemeant the road. She looked about her with a brave show of interest in thebare November woods, unroofed and open to the sunlight, and was rewardedby a throb of real interest to observe that she was where she had not beenfor forty years, when she used to clamber over the spur of HemlockMountain to hunt for lady's-slippers in the marshy ground at the head ofthe gorge. A few steps more and she would be on her own property, a steep, rocky tract of brushland left her by her great-uncle. She had a throb asshe realized that, besides her house and garden, this unsalable bit of themountainside was her only remaining possession. She had indeed come to theend. 

With the thought came her old dogged defiance to despair. She shut herhands on her crutches, pulled herself heavily up to her feet, and toiledforward through some brush. She would not allow herself to think ifthoughts were like that. Soon she came out into a little clearing besidethe Winthrop Branch, swirling and fumbling in its headlong descent. Theremains of a stone wall and a blackened beam or two showed her that shehad hit upon the ruins of the old sawmill her great-grandfather had owned. This forgotten and abandoned decay, a symbol of the future of the wholeregion, struck a last blow at the remnants of her courage. She sank downon the wall and set herself to a losing struggle with the blackness thatwas closing in about her. All her effort had been in vain. The fight wasover. She had not a weapon left. 

A last spark of valor flickered into flame within her. She stood up, lifting her head high, and summoning with a loudly beating heart everyscattered energy. She was alive; her fight could not be over while shestill breathed. 

For an instant she stood, self-hypnotized by the intensity of herresolution. Then there burst upon her ear, as though she had not heard itbefore, the roar of the water rushing past her. It sounded like a loudvoice calling to her. She shivered and turned a little giddy as thoughpassing into a trance, and then, with one bound, the gigantic forces ofsubconscious self, wrought by her long struggle to a white heat ofconcentration on one aim, arose and mastered her. For a time--hoursperhaps--she never knew how long, old Miss Abigail was a genius, with thebrain of an engineer and the prophetic vision of a seer. 

IV

The next months were the hardest of her life. The long dreary battleagainst insurmountable obstacles she had been able to bear with a stoicalfront, but the sickening alternations of emotions which now filled herdays wore upon her until she was fairly suffocated. About mail time eachday she became of an unendurable irritability, so that poor Miss Molly wasquite afraid to go near her. For the first time in her life there was noliving thing growing in her house. 

"Don't you mean to have any service this Christmas?" asked Miss Molly oneday. 

Miss Abigail shouted at her so fiercely that she retreated in a panic. "Why not? Why shouldn't we? What makes you think such a thing?"

"Why, I didn't know of anybody to go but just you and me, and I noticedthat you hadn't any flowers started for decorations the way you always do. "

Miss Abigail flamed and fulminated as though her timid little friend hadoffered her an insult. "I've been to service in that church everyChristmas since I was born and I shall till I die. And as for my notgrowing any flowers, that's _my_ business, ain't it!" Her voice crackedunder the outraged emphasis she put on it. 

Her companion fled away without a word, and Miss Abigail sank into a chairtrembling. It came over her with a shock that her preoccupation had beenso great that she had _forgotten_ about her winter flowers. 

The fortnight before Christmas was interminable to her. Every morning shebroke a hobbling path through the snow to the post-office, where shewaited with a haggard face for the postmaster's verdict of "nothing. " Therest of the day she wandered desolately about her house, from one windowto another, always staring, staring up at Hemlock Mountain. 

She disposed of the problem of the Christmas service with the absentcompetence of a person engrossed in greater matters. Miss Molly haddeclared it impossible--there was no money for a minister, there was nocongregation, there was no fuel for the furnace. Miss Abigail wrote sourgently to the Theological Seminary of the next State that they promisedone of their seniors for the service; and she loaded a hand sled with woodfrom her own woodshed and, harnessing herself and Miss Molly to it, drewit with painful difficulty through the empty village street. There was notenough of this fuel to fill even once the great furnace in the cellar, soshe decreed that the service should be in the vestibule where a stovestood. The last few days before Christmas she spent in sending outdesperate appeals to remote families to come. But when the morningarrived, she and Miss Molly were the only ones there. 

The young theologian appeared a little before the appointed time, broughtin the motor car of a wealthy friend of his own age. They were trying tomake a record winter trip, and were impatient at the delay occasioned bythe service. When they saw that two shabby old women constituted thecongregation, they laughed as they stood warming their hands by the stoveand waiting for the hour. They ignored the two women, chatting lightly oftheir own affairs. It seemed that they were on their way to a winter houseparty to which the young clergyman-to-be was invited on account of hisfine voice--an operetta by amateurs being one of the gayeties to whichthey looked forward. 

Miss Abigail and Miss Molly were silent in their rusty black, Miss Molly'ssoft eyes red with restrained tears, Miss Abigail's face like a flint. 

"A pretty place, this village is, " said the motorist to the minister. "Ihave visited the Ellerys here. Really charming in summer time--so utterlydeserted and peaceful. " He looked out of the window speculatively. "Ratherodd we should be passing through it to-day. There's been a lot of talkabout it in our family lately. "

"How so?" asked the minister, beginning cautiously to unwind the wrappingfrom around his throat. 

"Why, my brother-in-law--Peg's husband--don't you remember, the one whosang so fearfully flat in----" He was off on a reminiscence over whichboth men laughed loudly. 

Finally, "But what did you start to tell me about him?" asked the minister. 

"I forget, I'm sure. What was it? Oh, yes; he owns those print mills inJohnsonville--hideous place for Peg to live, that town!--and of late he'sbeen awfully put out by the failure of his water-power. There's not muchfall there at the best, and when the river's low--and it's low most allthe time nowadays--he doesn't get power enough, so he says, to run achurn! He's been wondering what he could do about it, when doesn't he geta tip from some old Rube up here that, above this village, there's awhopping water-power--the Winthrop Branch. I know it--fished it lots oftimes. He didn't take any stock in it of course at first, but, just on thechance, he sent his engineer up here to look it over, and, by Jove, it'strue. It'll furnish twice the power he's had in Johnsonville lately. "

"Seems queer, " said the minister a little skeptically, "that nobody's everthought of it before. "

"Well, _I_ said that, but Pete says that his engineer tells him that thereare lots of such unknown water-powers in the East. Nobody but farmers livenear 'em, you see. "

The minister was but mildly interested. "I thought the cost oftransmitting power was so great it didn't pay for any water-force butNiagara. "

"He isn't going to carry the power to Johnsonville. He's going to bringhis mill here. A lot of his operators come from around here and most of'em have kept their old homes, so there won't be any trouble about keepinghis help. Besides, it seems the old hayseed who wrote him about it ownedthe land, and offered him land, water-power, right of way--anything!--free, just to 'help the town' by getting the mill up here. That bespeaks thematerialistic Yankee, doesn't it?--to want to spoil a quiet littleParadise like this village with a lot of greasy mill-hands. "

The minister looked at his watch. "I think I'll begin the service now. There's no use waiting for a congregation to turn up. " He felt in onepocket after the other with increasing irritation. "Pshaw! I've left myeyeglasses out in the car. " The two disappeared, leaving the vestibuleechoing and empty. 

For a moment the two women did not speak. Then Miss Molly cast herselfupon her old friend's bosom. "They're coming back!" she cried. "Annie andher children!"

Miss Abigail stared over her head. "They are _all_ coming back, " she said, "and--we are ready for them. The library's ready--the school is ready--"she got up and opened the door into the great, cold, lofty church, "and--"They looked in silence at the empty pews. 

"Next Christmas!" said Miss Molly. "Next Christmas--"

The young minister bustled in, announcing as he came, "We will open theservice by singing hymn number forty-nine. "

He sat down before the little old organ and struck a resonant chord. 

 "Oh, come, all ye faithful!"

his full rich voice proclaimed, and then he stopped short, startled by agreat cry from Miss Abigail. Looking over his shoulder, he saw that thetears were streaming down her face. He smiled to himself at thesentimentality of old women and turned again to the organ, relieved thathis performance of a favorite hymn was not to be marred by crackedtrebles. He sang with much taste and expression. 

 "Oh, come, all ye faithful!"

he chanted lustily, "Joyful and triumphant!"