he had kept from sin would have gone to her and said, "My sister, his
love holds room for you and me"; have touched her with her woman's hand,
held out to her her woman's help, and blessed her with her woman's
prayers and tears?

Do you not think Meg knew the answer? Had she not learned it well, in
seven wandering years? Had she not read it in every blast of this bitter
night, out into which she had come to find a helper, when all the happy
world passed by her, on the other side?

She stood there, looking at the glittering of the city, then off into
the gloom where the path lay through the snow. Some struggle was in her
face.

"Home! home and mother! She don't want me,--nobody wants me. I'd better
go back."

The storm was beating upon her. But, looking from the city to the
drifted path, and back from the lonely path to the lighted city, she did
not stir.

"I should like to see it, just to look in the window, a little,--it
wouldn't hurt 'em any. Nobody'd know."

She turned, walking slowly where the snow lay pure and untrodden. On,
out of sight of the town, where the fields were still; thinking only as
she went, that nobody would know,--nobody would know.

She would see the old home out in the dark; she could even say good-by
to it quite aloud, and they wouldn't hear her, or come and drive her
away. And then--

She looked around where the great shadows lay upon the fields, felt the
weakening of her limbs, her failing breath, and smiled. Not Meg's smile;
a very quiet smile, with a little quiver in it. She would find a still
place under the trees somewhere; the snow would cover her quite out of
sight before morning,--the pure, white snow. She would be only Maggie
then.

The road, like some familiar dream, wound at last into the village. Down
the street where her childish feet had pattered in their playing, by the
old town pump, where, coming home from school, she used to drink the
cool, clear water on summer noons, she passed,--a silent shadow. She
might have been the ghost of some dead life, so moveless was her face.
She stopped at last, looking about her.

"Where? I most forget."

Turning out from the road, she found a brook half hidden under the
branches of a dripping tree,--frozen now; only a black glare of ice,
where she pushed away the snow with her foot. It might have been a
still, green place in summer, with banks of moss, and birds singing
overhead. Some faint color flushed all her face; she did not hear the
icicles dropping from the lonely tree.

"Yes,"--she began to talk softly to herself,--"this is it. The first
time I ever saw him, he stood over there under the tree. Let me see;
wasn't I crossing the brook? Yes, I was crossing the brook; on the
stones. I had a pink dress. I looked in the glass when I went home,"
brushing her soft hair out of her eyes. "Did I look pretty? I can't
remember. It's a great while ago."

She came back into the street after that, languidly, for the snow lay
deeper. The wind, too, had chilled her more than she knew. The sleet was
frozen upon her mute, white face. She tried to draw her cloak more
closely about her, but her hands refused to hold it. She looked at them
curiously.

"Numb? How much farther, I wonder?"

It was not long before she came to it. The house stood up silently in
the night. A single light glimmered far out upon the garden. Her eye
caught it eagerly. She followed it down, across the orchard, and the
little plats where the flowers used to be so bright all summer long. She
had not forgotten them. She used to go out in the morning and pick them
for her mother,--a whole apronful, purple, and pink, and white, with
dewdrops on them. She was fit to touch them then. Her mother used to
smile when she brought them in. Her mother! Nobody ever smiled so since.
Did she know it? Did she ever wonder what had become of her,--the little
girl who used to kiss her? Did she ever want to see her? Sometimes,
when she prayed up in the old bedroom, did she remember her daughter
who had sinned, or guess that she was tired of it all, and how no one in
all the wide world would help her?

She was sleeping there now. And the father. She was afraid to see him;
he would send her away, if he knew she had come out in the snow to look
at the old home. She wondered if her mother would.

She opened the gate, and went in. The house was very still. So was the
yard, and the gleam of light that lay golden on the snow. The numbness
of her body began to steal over her brain. She thought at moments, as
she crawled up the path upon her hands and knees,--for she could no
longer walk,--that she was dreaming some pleasant dream; that the door
would open, and her mother come out to meet her. Attracted like a child
by the broad belt of light, she followed it over and through a piling
drift. It led her to the window where the curtain was pushed aside. She
managed to reach the blind, and so stand up a moment, clinging to it,
looking in, the glow from the fire sharp on her face. Then she sank down
upon the snow by the door.

Lying so, her face turned up against it, her stiffened lips kissing the
very dumb, unanswering wood, a thought came to her. She remembered the
day. For seven long years she had not thought of it.

A spasm crossed her face, her hands falling clinched. Who was it of whom
it was written, that better were it for that man if he had never been
born? Of Magdalene, more vile than Judas, what should be said?

Yet it was hard, I think, to fall so upon the very threshold,--so near
the quiet, peaceful room, with the warmth, and light, and rest; to stay
all night in the storm, with eyes turned to that dead, pitiless sky,
without one look into her mother's face, without one kiss, or gentle
touch, or blessing, and die so, looking up! No one to hold her hand and
look into her eyes, and hear her say she was sorry,--sorry for it all!
That they should find her there in the morning, when her poor, dead face
could not see if she were forgiven!

"I should like to go in," sobbing, with the first tears of many years
upon her cheek,--weak, pitiful tears, like a child's,--"just in out of
the cold!"

Some sudden strength fell on her after that. She reached up, fumbling
for the latch. It opened at her first touch; the door swung wide into
the silent house.

She crawled in then, into the kitchen where the fire was, and the
rocking-chair; the plants in the window, and the faded cricket upon the
hearth; the dog, too, roused from his nap behind the stove. He began to
growl at her, his eyes on fire.

"Muff!" she smiled weakly, stretching out her hand. He did not know
her,--he was fierce with strangers. "Muff! don't you know me? I'm
Maggie; there, there, Muff, good fellow!"

She crept up to him fearlessly, putting both her arms about his neck,
in a way she had of soothing him when she was his playfellow. The
creature's low growl died away. He submitted to her touch, doubtfully at
first, then he crouched on the floor beside her, wagging his tail,
wetting her face with his huge tongue.

"Muff, _you_ know me, you old fellow! I'm sorry, Muff, I am,--I wish we
could go out and play together again. I'm very tired, Muff."

She laid her head upon the dog, just as she used to long ago, creeping
up near the fire. A smile broke all over her face, at Muff's short,
happy bark.

"_He_ don't turn me off; he don't know; he thinks I'm nobody but
Maggie."

How long she lay so, she did not know. It might have been minutes, it
might have been hours; her eyes wandering all about the room, growing
brighter too, and clearer. They would know now that she had come back;
that she wanted to see them; that she had crawled into the old room to
die; that Muff had not forgotten her. Perhaps, _perhaps_ they would look
at her not unkindly, and cry over her just a little, for the sake of the
child they used to love.

Martha Ryck, coming in at last, found her with her long hair falling
over her face, her arms still about the dog, lying there in the
firelight.

The woman's eyelids fluttered for an instant, her lips moving dryly; but
she made no sound. She came up, knelt upon the floor, pushed Muff
gently away, and took her child's head upon her lap.

"Maggie!"

She opened her eyes and looked up.

"Mother's glad to see you, Maggie."

The girl tried to smile, her face all quivering.

"Mother, I--I wanted you. I thought I wasn't fit."

Her mother stooped and kissed her lips,--the polluted, purple lips, that
trembled so.

"I thought you would come back to me, my daughter. I've watched for you
a great while."

She smiled at that, pushing away her falling hair.

"Mother, I'm so sorry."

"Yes, Maggie."

"And oh!" she threw out her arms; "O, I'm so tired, I'm so tired!"

Her mother raised her, laying her head upon her shoulder.

"Mother'll rest you, Maggie," soothing her, as if she sang again her
first lullaby, when she came to her, the little pure baby,--her only
one.

"Mother," once more, "the door was unlocked."

"It has been unlocked every night for seven years, my child."

She closed her eyes after that, some stupor creeping over her, her
features in the firelight softening and melting, with the old child-look
coming into them. Looking up at last, she saw another face bending over
her, a face in which grief had worn stern lines; there were tears in
the eyes, and some recent struggle quivering out of it.

"Father, I didn't mean to come in,--I didn't really; but I was so cold.
Don't send me off, father! I couldn't walk so far,--I shall be out of
your way in a little while,--the cough--"

"_I_ send you away, Maggie? I--I might have done it once; God forgive
me! He sent you back, my daughter,--I thank him."

A darkness swept over both faces then; she did not even hear Muff's
whining cry at her ear.

"Mother," at last, the light of the room coming back, "there's Somebody
who was wounded. I guess I'm going to find him. Will he forget it all?"

"All, Maggie."

For what did He tell the sin-laden woman who came to him once, and dared
not look into his face? Was ever soul so foul and crimson-stained that
he could not make it pure and white? Does he not linger till his locks
are wet with the dews of night, to listen for the first, faint call of
any wanderer crying to him in the dark?

So He came to Maggie. So he called her by her name,--Magdalene, most
precious to him; whom he had bought with a great price; for whom, with
groanings that cannot be uttered, he had pleaded with his Father:
Magdalene, chosen from all eternity, to be graven in the hollow of his
hand, to stand near to him before the throne, to look with fearless
eyes into his face, to touch him with her happy tears among his sinless
ones forever.

And think you that _then_, any should scorn the woman whom the high and
lofty One, beholding, did thus love? Who could lay anything to the
charge of his elect?

Perhaps he told her all this, in the pauses of the storm, for something
in her face transfigured it.

"Mother, it's all over now. I think I shall be your little girl again."

And so, with a smile, she went to Him. The light flashed broader and
brighter about the room, and on the dead face there,--never Meg's again.
A strong man, bowed over it, was weeping. Muff moaned out his brute
sorrow where the still hand touched him.

But Martha Ryck, kneeling down beside her only child, gave thanks to
God.

What Was the Matter?

I could not have been more than seven or eight years old, when it
happened; but it might have been yesterday. Among all other childish
memories, it stands alone. To this very day it brings with it the old,
utter sinking of the heart, and the old, dull sense of mystery.

To read what I have to say, you should have known my mother. To
understand it, you should understand her. But that is quite impossible
now, for there is a quiet spot over the hill, and past the church, and
beside the little brook where the crimsoned mosses grow thick and wet
and cool, from which I cannot call her. It is all I have left of her
now. But after all, it is not of her that you will chiefly care to hear.
My object is simply to acquaint you with a few facts, which, though
interwoven with the events of her life, are quite independent of it as
objects of interest. It is, I know, only my own heart that makes these
pages a memorial,--but, you see, I cannot help it.

Yet, I confess, no glamour of any earthly love has ever entirely dazzled
me,--not even hers. Of imperfections, of mistakes, of sins, I knew she
was guilty. I know it now; even with the sanctity of those crimsoned
mosses, and the hush of the rest beneath, so close to my heart, I cannot
forget them. Yet somehow--I do not know how--the imperfections, the
mistakes, the very sins, bring her nearer to me as the years slip by,
and make her dearer.

My mother was what we call an aristocrat. I do not like the term, as the
term is used. I am sure she does not now; but I have no other word. She
was a royal-looking woman, and she had the blood of princes in her
veins. Generations back,--how we children used to reckon the thing
over!--she was cradled in a throne. A miserable race, to be sure, they
were,--the Stuarts; and the most devout genealogist might deem it
dubious honor to own them for great-grand-fathers by innumerable degrees
removed. So she used to tell us, over and over, as a damper on our
childish vanity, looking such a very queen as she spoke, in every play
of feature, and every motion of her hand, that it was the old story of
preachers who did not practise. The very baby was proud of her. The
beauty of a face, and the elegant repose of a manner, are influences by
no means more unfelt at three years than at thirty.

As insanity will hide itself away, and lie sleeping, and die out,--while
old men are gathered to their fathers scathless, and young men follow in
their footsteps safe and free,--and start into life, and claim its own
when children's children have forgotten it; as a single trait of a
single scholar in a race of clods will bury itself in day-laborers and
criminals, unto the third and fourth generation, and spring then, like a
creation from a chaos, into statesmen and poets and sculptors;--so, I
have sometimes fancied, the better and truer nature of voluptuaries and
tyrants was sifted down through the years, and purified in our little
New England home, and the essential autocracy of monarchical blood
refined and ennobled, in my mother, into royalty.

A broad and liberal culture had moulded her; she knew its worth, in
every fibre of her heart; scholarly parents had blessed her with their
legacies of scholarly mind and name. With the soul of an artist, she
quivered under every grace and every defect; and the blessing of a
beauty as rare as rich had been given to her. With every instinct of her
nature recoiling from the very shadow of crimes the world winks at, the
family record had been stainless for a generation. God had indeed
blessed her; but the very blessing was a temptation.

I knew, before she left me, what she might have been, but for the
merciful and tender watch of Him who was despised and rejected of men. I
know, for she told me, one still night when we were alone together, how
she sometimes shuddered at herself, and what those daily and hourly
struggles between her nature and her Christianity _meant_.

I think we were as near to one another as mother and daughter can be,
but yet as different. Since I have been talking in such lordly style of
those miserable Jameses and Charleses, I will take the opportunity to
confess that I have inherited my father's thorough-going
democracy,--double measure, pressed down and running over. She not only
pardoned it, but I think she loved it in me, for his sake.

It was about a year and a half, I think, after he died, that she sent
for Aunt Alice to come to Creston. "Your aunt loves me," she said, when
she told us in her quiet way, "and I am so lonely now."

They had been the only children, and they loved each other,--how much, I
afterwards knew. And how much they love each other _now_, I like to
think,--quite freely and fully, and without shadow or doubt between
them, I dare to hope.

A picture of Aunt Alice always hung in mother's room. It was taken down
years ago. I never asked her where she put it. I remember it, though,
quite well; for mother's sake I am glad I do. For it was a pleasant face
to look upon, and a young, pure, happy face,--beautiful too, though with
none of the regal beauty crowned by my mother's massive hair, and
pencilled brows. It was a timid, girlish face, with reverent eyes, and
ripe, tremulous lips,--weak lips, as I remember them. From babyhood, I
felt a want in the face. I had, of course, no capacity to define it; it
was represented to me only by the fact that it differed from my
mother's.

She was teaching school out West when mother sent for her. I saw the
letter. It was just like my mother: "Alice, I need you. You and I ought
to have but one home now. Will you come?"

I saw, too, a bit of postscript to the answer: "I'm not fit that you
should love me so, Marie."

And how mother laughed at it!

When it was all settled, and the waiting weeks became at last a single
day, I hardly knew my mother. She was so full of fitful moods, and
little fantastic jokes! such a flush on her cheeks too, as she ran to
the window every five minutes, like a child! I remember how we went all
over the house together, she and I, to see that everything looked neat,
and bright, and welcome. And how we lingered in the guest-room, to put
the little finishing touches to its stillness, and coolness, and
coseyness. The best spread was on the bed, and the white folds smoothed
as only mother's fingers could smooth them; the curtain freshly washed,
and looped with its crimson cord; the blinds drawn, cool and green; the
late afternoon sunlight slanting through, in flecks upon the floor.
There were flowers, too, upon the table. I remember they were all
white,--lilies of the valley, I think; and the vase of Parian marble,
itself a solitary lily, unfolding stainless leaves. Over the mantle she
had hung the finest picture in the house,--an "Ecce Homo," and an
exquisite engraving. It used to hang in grandmother's room in the old
house. We children wondered a little that she took it upstairs.

"I want your aunt to feel at home, and see some things," she said. "I
wish I could think of something more to make it pleasant in here."

Just as we left the room she turned and looked into it. "Pleasant, isn't
it? I am so glad, Sarah," her eyes dimming a little. "She's a very dear
sister to me."

She stepped in again to raise a stem of the lilies that had fallen from
the vase and lay like wax upon the table, then she shut the door and
came away.

That door was shut just so for years; the lonely bars of sunlight
flecked the solitude of the room, and the lilies faded on the table. We
children passed it with hushed footfall, and shrank from it at twilight,
as from a room that held the dead. But into it we never went.

Mother was tired out that afternoon; for she had been on her feet all
day, busied in her loving cares to make our simple home as pleasant and
as welcome as home could be. But yet she stopped to dress us in our
Sunday clothes,--and it was no sinecure to dress three persistently
undressable children; Winthrop was a host in himself. "Auntie must see
us look our prettiest," she said.

She was a sight for an artist when she came down. She had taken off her
widow's cap and coiled her heavy hair low in her neck, and she always
looked like a queen in that lustreless black silk. I do not know why
these little things should have made such an impression on me then.
They are priceless to me now. I remember how she looked, framed there in
the doorway, while we were watching for the coach,--the late light
ebbing in golden tides over the grass at her feet, and touching her face
now and then through the branches of trees, her head bent a little, with
eager, parted lips, and the girlish color on her cheeks, her hand
shading her eyes as they strained for a sight of the lumbering coach.
She must have been a magnificent woman when she was young,--not unlike,
I have heard it said, to that far-off ancestress whose name she bore,
and whose sorrowful story has made her sorrowful beauty immortal.
Somewhere abroad there is a reclining statue of Queen Mary, to which,
when my mother stood beside it, her resemblance was so strong that the
by-standers clustered about her, whispering curiously. "Ah, mon Dieu!"
said a little Frenchman aloud, "c'est une résurrection."

We must have tried her that afternoon, Clara and Winthrop and I; for the
spirit of her own excitement had made us completely wild. Winthrop's
scream of delight, when, stationed on the gate-post, he caught the first
sight of the old yellow coach, might have been heard a quarter of a
mile.

"Coming?" said mother, nervously, and stepped out to the gate, full in
the sunlight that crowned her like royal gold.

The coach lumbered on, and rattled up, and passed.

"Why, she hasn't come!" All the eager color died out of her face. "I am
so disappointed!"--speaking like a troubled child, and turning slowly
into the house.

Then, after a while, she drew me aside from the others,--I was the
oldest, and she was used to make a sort of confidence between us,
instinctively, as it seemed, and often quite forgetting how very few my
years were. "Sarah, I don't understand. You think she might have lost
the train? But Alice is so punctual. Alice never lost a train. And she
said she would come." And then, a while after, "I _don't_ understand."

It was not like my mother to worry. The next day the coach lumbered up
and rattled past, and did not stop,--and the next, and the next.

"We shall have a letter," mother said, her eyes saddening every
afternoon. But we had no letter. And another day went by, and another.

"She is sick," we said; and mother wrote to her, and watched for the
lumbering coach, and grew silent day by day. But to the letter there was
no answer.

Ten days passed. Mother came to me one afternoon to ask for her pen,
which I had borrowed. Something in her face troubled me vaguely.

"What are you going to do, mother?"

"Write to your aunt's boarding-place. I can't bear this any longer." She
spoke sharply. She had already grown unlike herself.

She wrote, and asked for an answer by return of mail.

It was on a Wednesday, I remember, that we looked for it. I came home
early from school. Mother was sewing at the parlor window, her eyes
wandering from her work, up the road. It was an ugly day. It had rained
drearily from eight o'clock till two, and closed in suffocating mist,
creeping and dense and chill. It gave me a childish fancy of long-closed
tombs and low-land graveyards, as I walked home in it.

I tried to keep the younger children quiet when we went in, mother was
so nervous. As the early, uncanny twilight fell, we grouped around her
timidly. A dull sense of awe and mystery clung to the night, and clung
to her watching face, and clung even then to that closed room upstairs
where the lilies were fading.

Mother sat leaning her head upon her hand, the outline of her face dim
in the dusk against the falling curtain. She was sitting so when we
heard the first rumble of the distant coach-wheels. At the sound, she
folded her hands in her lap and stirred a little, rose slowly from her
chair, and sat down again.

"Sarah."

I crept up to her. At the near sight of her face, I was so frightened I
could have cried.

"Sarah, you may go out and get the letter. I--I can't."

I went slowly out at the door and down the walk. At the gate I looked
back. The outline of her face was there against the window-pane, white
in the gathering gloom.

It seems to me that my older and less sensitive years have never known
such a night. The world was stifling in a deluge of gray, cold mists,
unstirred by a breath of air. A robin with feathers all ruffled, and
head hidden, sat on the gate-post, and chirped a little mournful chirp,
like a creature dying in a vacuum. The very daisy that nodded and
drooped in the grass at my feet seemed to be gasping for breath. The
neighbor's house, not forty paces across the street, was invisible. I
remember the sensation it gave me, as I struggled to find its outlines,
of a world washed out, like the figures I washed out on my slate. As I
trudged, half frightened, into the road, and the fog closed about me, it
seemed to my childish superstition like a horde of long-imprisoned
ghosts let loose, and angry. The distant sound of the coach, which I
could not see, added to the fancy.

The coach turned the corner presently. On a clear day I could see the
brass buttons on the driver's coat at that distance. There was nothing
visible now of the whole dark structure but the two lamps in front, like
the eyes of some evil thing, glaring and defiant, borne with swift
motion down upon me by a power utterly unseen,--it had a curious effect.
Even at this time, I confess I do not like to see a lighted carriage
driven through a fog.

I summoned all my little courage, and piped out the driver's name,
standing there in the road.

He reined up his horses with a shout,--he had nearly driven over me.
After some searching, he discovered the small object cowering down in
the mist, handed me a letter, with a muttered oath at being intercepted
on such a night, and lumbered on and out of sight in three rods.

I went slowly into the house. Mother had lighted a lamp, and stood at
the parlor door. She did not come into the hall to meet me.

She took the letter and went to the light, holding it with the seal
unbroken. She might have stood so two minutes.

"Why don't you read, mamma?" spoke up Winthrop. I hushed him.

She opened it then, read it, laid it down upon the table, and went out
of the room without a word. I had not seen her face. We heard her go
upstairs and shut the door.

She had left the letter open there before us. After a little awed
silence, Clara broke out into sobs. I went up and read the few and
simple lines.

_Aunt Alice had left for Creston on the appointed day_.

Mother spent that night in the closed room where the lilies had drooped
and died. Clara and I heard her pacing the floor till we cried ourselves
to sleep. When we woke in the morning, she was pacing it still.

Weeks wore into months, and the months became many years. More than
that we never knew. Some inquiry revealed the fact, after a while, that
a slight accident had occurred, upon the Erie Railroad, to the train
which she should have taken. There was some disabling, but no deaths,
the conductor had supposed. The car had fallen into the water. She might
not have been missed when the half-drowned passengers were all drawn
out.

So mother added a little crape to her widow's weeds, the key of the
closed room lay henceforth in her drawer, and all things went on as
before. To her children my mother was never gloomy,--it was not her way.
No shadow of household affliction was placed like a skeleton confronting
our uncomprehending joy. Of what those weeks and months and years were
to her--a widow, and quite uncomforted in their dark places by any human
love--she gave no sign. We thought her a shade paler, perhaps. We found
her often alone with her little Bible. Sometimes, on the Sabbath, we
missed her, and knew that she had gone into that closed room. But she
was just as tender with us in our little faults and sorrows, as merry
with us in our plays, as eager in our gayest plans, as she had always
been. As she had always been,--our mother.

And so the years slipped from her and from us. Winthrop went into
business in Boston; he never took to his books, and mother was too wise
to _push_ him through college; but I think she was disappointed. He was
her only boy, and she would have chosen for him the profession of his
father and grandfather. Clara and I graduated in our white dresses and
blue ribbons, like other girls, and came home to mother, crochet-work,
and Tennyson. Just about here is the proper place to begin my story.

I mean that about here our old and long-tried cook, Bathsheba, who had
been an heirloom in the family, suddenly fell in love with the older
sexton, who had rung the passing-bell for every soul who died in the
village for forty years, and took it into her head to marry him, and
desert our kitchen for his little brown house under the hill.

So it came about that we hunted the township for a handmaiden; and it
also came about that our inquiring steps led us to the poor-house. A
stout, not over-brilliant-looking girl, about twelve years of age, was
to be had for her board and clothes, and such schooling as we could give
her,--in country fashion to be "bound out" till she should be eighteen.
The economy of the arrangement decided in her favor; for, in spite of
our grand descent and grander notions, we were poor enough, after father
died, and the education of three children had made no small gap in our
little principal, and she came.

Her name was a singular one,--Selphar. It always savored too nearly of
brimstone to please me. I used to call her Sel, "for short." She was a
good, sensible, uninteresting-looking girl, with broad face, large
features, and limp, tow-colored curls. They used to hang straight down
about her eyes, and were never otherwise than perfectly smooth. She
proved to be of good temper, which is worth quite as much as brains in a
servant, as honest as the daylight, dull enough at her books, but a
good, plodding worker, if you marked out every step of the way for her
beforehand. I do not think she would ever have discovered the laws of
gravitation; but she might have jumped off a precipice to prove them, if
she had been bidden.

Until she was seventeen, she was precisely like any other rather stupid
girl; never given to novel-reading or fancies; never, frightened by the
dark or ghost-stories; proving herself warmly attached to us, after a
while, and rousing in us, in return, the kindly interest naturally felt
for a faithful servant; but she was not in any respect _un_common,
--quite far from it,--except in the circumstance that she never told a
false-hood.

At seventeen she had a violent attack of diphtheria, and her life hung
by a thread. Mother was as tender and unwearying in her care of her as
the girl's own mother might have been.

From that time, I believe, Sel was immovable in her faith in her
mistress's divinity. Under such nursing as she had, she slowly
recovered, but her old, stolid strength never came back to her. Severe
headaches became of frequent occurrence. Her stout, muscular arms grew
weak. As weeks went on, it became evident in many ways that, though the
diphtheria itself was quite out of her system, it had left her
thoroughly diseased. Strange fits of silence came over her; her
volubility had been the greatest objection we had to her hitherto. Her
face began to wear a troubled look. She was often found in places where
she had stolen away to be alone.

One morning she slept late in her little garret-chamber, and we did not
call her. The girl had gone upstairs the night before crying with the
pain in her temples, and mother, who was always thoughtful of her
servants, said it was a pity to wake her, and, as there were only three
of us, we might get our own breakfast for once. While we were at work
together in the kitchen, Clara heard her kitten mewing out in the snow,
and went to the door to let her in. The creature, possessed by some
sudden frolic, darted away behind the well-curb. Clara was always a bit
of a romp, and, with never a thought of her daintily slippered feet, she
flung her trailing dress over one arm and was off over the three-inch
snow. The cat led her a brisk chase, and she came in flushed and
panting, and pretty, her little feet drenched, and the tip of a Maltese
tail just visible above a great bundle she had made of her apron.

"Why!" said mother, "you have lost your ear-ring."

Clara dropped the kitten with unceremonious haste on the floor, felt of
her little pink ear, shook her apron, and the corners of her mouth went
down into her dimpled chin.

"They're the ones Winthrop sent, of all things in the world!"

"You'd better put on your rubbers, and have a hunt out-doors," said
mother.

We hunted out-doors,--on the steps, on the well-boards, in the
wood-shed, in the snow; Clara looked down the well till her nose and
fingers were blue, but the ear-ring was not to be found. We hunted
in-doors, under the stove and the chairs and the table, in every
possible and impossible nook, cranny, and crevice, but gave up the
search in despair. It was a pretty trinket,--a leaf of delicately
wrought gold, with a pearl dew-drop on it,--very becoming to Clara, and
the first present Winthrop had sent her from his earnings. If she had
been a little younger she would have cried. She came very near it as it
was, I suspect, for when she went after the plates she stayed in the
cupboard long enough to set two tables.

When we were half through breakfast, Selphar came down, blushing, and
frightened half out of her wits, her apologies tumbling over each other
with such skill as to render each one unintelligible, and evidently
undecided in her own mind whether she was to be hung or burnt at the
stake.

"It's no matter at all," said mother, kindly; "I knew you felt sick last
night. I should have called you if I had needed you."

Having set the girl at her ease, as only she could do, she went on with
her breakfast, and we forgot all about her. She stayed, however, in the
room to wait on the table. It was afterwards remembered that she had not
been out of our sight since she came down the garret-stairs. Also, that
her room looked out upon the opposite side of the house from that on
which the well-curb stood.

"Why, look at Sel!" said Clara, suddenly, "she has her eyes shut."

The girl was just passing the toast. Mother spoke to her. "Selphar, what
is the matter?"

"I don't know."

"Why don't you open your eyes?"

"I can't."

"Hand the salt to Miss Sarah."

She took it up and brought it round the table to me, with perfect
precision.

"Sel, how you act!" said Clara, petulantly. "Of course you saw."

"Yes'm, I saw," said the girl in a puzzled way, "but my eyes are shut,
Miss Clara."

"Tight?"

"Tight."

Whatever this freak meant, we thought best to take no notice of it. My
mother told her, somewhat gravely, that she might sit down until she was
wanted, and we returned to our conversation about the ear-ring.

"Why!" said Sel, with a little jump, "I see your ear-ring. Miss
Clara,--the one with a white drop on the leaf. It's out by the well."

The girl was sitting with her back to the window, her eyes, to all
appearance, tightly closed.

"It's on the right-hand side, under the snow, between the well and the
wood-pile. Why, don't you see?"

Clara began to look frightened, mother displeased.

"Selphar," she said, "this is nonsense. It is impossible for you to see
through the walls of two rooms and a wood-shed."

"May I go and get it?" said the girl, quietly.

"Sel," said Clara, "on your word and honor, are your eyes shut
_perfectly_ tight?"

"If they ain't, Miss Clara, then they never was."

Sel never told a lie. We looked at each other, and let her go. I
followed her out and kept my eyes on her closed lids. She did not once
raise them; nor did they tremble, as lids will tremble, if only
partially closed.

She walked without the slightest hesitation directly to the well-curb,
to the spot which she had mentioned, stooped down, and brushed away the
three-inch fall of snow. The ear-ring lay there, where it had sunk in
falling. She picked it up, carried it in, and gave it to Clara.

That Clara had the thing on when she started after her kitten, there
could be no doubt. She and I both remembered it. That Sel, asleep on
the opposite side of the house, could not have seen it drop, was also
settled. That she, with her eyes closed and her back to the window, had
seen through three walls and through three inches of snow, at a distance
of fifty feet, was an inference.

"I don't believe it!" said my mother, "it's some nonsensical mistake."
Clara looked a little pale, and I laughed.

We watched her carefully through the day. Her eyes remained tightly
closed. She understood all that was said to her, answered correctly, but
did, not seem inclined to talk. She went about her work as usual, and
performed it without a mistake. It could not be seen that she groped at
all with her hands to feel her way, as is the case with the blind. On
the contrary, she touched everything with her usual decision. It was
impossible to believe, without seeing them, that her eyes were closed.

We tied a handkerchief tightly over them; see through it or below it she
could not, if she had tried. We then sent her into the parlor, with
orders to bring from the book-case two Bibles which had been given as
prizes to Clara and me at school, when we were children. The books were
of precisely the same size, color, and texture. Our names in gilt
letters were printed upon the binding. We followed her in, and watched
her narrowly. She went directly to the book-case, laid her hands upon
the books at once, and brought them to my mother. Mother changed them
from hand to hand several times, and turned them with the gilt lettering
downwards upon her lap.

"Now, Selphar, which is Miss Sarah's?"

The girl quietly took mine up. The experiment was repeated and varied
again and again. In every case the result was the same. She made no
mistake. It was no guess-work. All this was done with the bandage
tightly drawn about her eyes. _She did not see those letters with them_.

That evening we were sitting quietly in the dining-room. Selphar sat a
little apart with her sewing, her eyes still closed. We kept her with
us, and kept her in sight. The parlor, which was a long room, was
between us and the front of the house. The distance was so great that we
had often thought, if prowlers were to come around at night, how
impossible it would be to hear them. The curtains and shutters were
closely drawn. Sel was sitting by the fire. Suddenly she turned pale,
dropped her sewing, and sprang from her chair.

"Robbers, robbers!" she cried. "Don't you see? they're getting in the
east parlor window! There's three of 'em, and a lantern. They've just
opened the window,--hurry, hurry!"

"I believe the girl is insane," said mother, decidedly. Nevertheless,
she put out the light, opened the parlor door noiselessly, and went in.

The east window was open. There was a quick vision of three men and a
dark lantern. Then Clara screamed, and it disappeared. We went to the
window, and saw the men running down the street. The snow the next
morning was found trodden down under the window, and their footprints
were traced out to the road.

When we went back to the other room, Selphar was standing in the middle
of it, a puzzled, frightened look on her face, her eyes wide open.

"Selphar," said my mother, a little suspiciously, "how did you know the
robbers were there?"

"Robbers!" said the girl, aghast.

She knew nothing of the robbers. She knew nothing of the ear-ring. She
remembered nothing that had happened since she went up the garret-stairs
to bed, the night before. And, as I said, the girl was as honest as the
sunlight. When we told her what had happened, she burst into terrified
tears.

For some time after this there was no return of the "tantrums," as
Selphar had called the condition, whatever it was. I began to get up
vague theories of a trance state. But mother said, "Nonsense!" and Clara
was too much frightened to reason at all about the matter.

One Sunday morning Sel complained of a headache. There was service that
evening, and we all went to church. Mother let Sel take the empty seat
in the carryall beside her.

It was very dark when we started to come home. But Creston was a safe
old Orthodox town, the roads were filled with returning church-goers
like ourselves, and mother drove like a man. A darker night I think I
have never seen. Literally, we could not see a hand before our eyes. We
met a carriage on a narrow road and the horses' heads touched, before
either driver had seen the other.

Selphar had been quite silent during the drive. I leaned forward, looked
closely into her face, and could dimly see through the darkness that her
eyes were closed.

"Why!" she said at last, "see those gloves!"

"Where?"

"Down in the ditch; we passed them before I spoke. I see them on a
blackberry-bush; they've got little brass buttons on the wrist."

Three rods past now, and we could not see our horse's head.

"Selphar," said my mother, quickly, "what _is_ the matter with you?"

"If you please, ma'am, I don't know," replied the girl, hanging her
head. "May I get out and bring 'em to you?"

Prince was reined up, and Sel got out. She went so far back, that,
though we strained our eyes to do it, we could not see her. In about two
minutes she came up, a pair of gentleman's gloves in her hand. They were
rolled together, were of cloth so black that on a bright night it would
never have been seen, and had small brass buttons at the wrist.

Mother took them without a word.

The story leaked out somehow, and spread all over town. It raised a
great hue and cry. Four or five antediluvian ladies declared at once
that we were nothing more nor less than a family of "them spirituous
mediums," and seriously proposed to expel mother from the
prayer-meeting. Masculine Creston did worse. It smiled a pitying smile,
and pronounced the whole thing the fancy of "scared women-folks." I
could endure with calmness any slander upon earth but that. I bore it a
number of weeks, till at last, driven by despair, I sent for Winthrop,
and stated the case to him in a condition of suppressed fury. He very
politely bit back an incredulous smile, and said he should be _very_
happy to see her perform. The answer was somewhat dubious. I accepted it
in silent suspicion.

He came on a Saturday noon. That afternoon we attended _en masse_ one of
those refined inquisitions commonly known as picnics, and Winthrop lost
his pocket-knife. Selphar, of course, kept house at home.

When we returned, Winthrop made some careless reference to his loss in
her presence, and thought no more of it. About half an hour after, we
observed that she was washing the dishes with her eyes shut. The
condition had not been upon her five minutes before she dropped the
spoon suddenly into the water, and asked permission to go out to walk.
She "saw Mr. Winthrop's knife somewhere under a stone, and wanted to get
it." It was fully two miles to the picnic grounds, and nearly dark.
Winthrop followed the girl, unknown to her, and kept her in sight. She
went rapidly, and without the slightest hesitation or search, to an
out-of-the-way gully down by the pond, where Winthrop afterwards
remembered having gone to cut some willow-twigs for the girls, parted a
thick cluster of bushes, lifted a large, loose stone under which the
knife had rolled, and picked it up. She returned it to Winthrop,
quietly, and hurried away about her work to avoid being thanked.

I observed that, after this incident, masculine Creston became more
respectful.

Of several peculiarities in this development of the girl I made at the
time careful memoranda, and the exactness of these can be relied upon.

1. She herself, so far from attempting to bring on these trance states,
or taking any pride therein, was intensely troubled and mortified by
them,--would run out of the room, if she felt them coming on in the
presence of visitors.

2. They were apt to be preceded by severe headaches, but came often
without any warning.

3. She never, in any instance, recalled anything that happened during
the trance, after it was passed.

4. She was powerfully and unpleasantly affected by electricity from a
battery, or acting in milder forms. She was also unable at any time to
put her hands and arms into hot water; the effect was to paralyze them
at once.

5. Space proved to be no impediment to her vision. She has been known to
follow the acts, words, and expressions of countenance of members of the
family hundreds of miles away, with accuracy as was afterwards proved by
comparing notes as to time.

6. The girl's eyes, after her trances became habitual, assumed, and
always retained, the most singular expression I ever saw on any face.
They were oblong and narrow, and set back in her head like the eyes of a
snake. They were not--smile if you will, O practical and incredulous
reader! but they were not--eyes. The eyes of Elsie Venner are the only
eyes I can think of as at all like them. The most horrible circumstance
about them--a circumstance that always made me shudder, familiar as I
was with it--was, that, though turned fully on you, _they never looked
at you_. Something behind them or out of them did the seeing, not they.

7. She not only saw substance, but soul. She has repeatedly told me my
thoughts when they were upon subjects to which she could not by any
possibility have had the slightest clew.

8. We were never able to detect a shadow of deceit about her.

9. The clairvoyance never failed in any instance to be correct, so far
as we were able to trace it.

As will be readily imagined, the girl became a useful member of the
family. The lost valuables restored and the warnings against mischances
given by her quite balanced her incapacity for peculiar kinds of work.
This incapacity, however, rather increased than diminished; and,
together with her fickle health, which also grew more unsettled, caused
us a great deal of care. The Creston physician--who was a keen man in
his way, for a country doctor--pronounced the case altogether undreamt
of before in Horatio's philosophy, and kept constant notes of it. Some
of these have, I believe, found their way into the medical journals.

After a while there came, like a thief in the night, that which I
suppose was poor Selphar's one unconscious, golden mission in this
world. It came on a quiet summer night, that ended a long trance of a
week's continuance. Mother had gone out into the kitchen to give an
order for breakfast. I heard a few eager words in Selphar's voice, and
then the door shut quickly, and it was an hour before it was opened.

Then my mother came to me without a particle of color in lips or cheek,
and drew me away alone, and told the secret to me.

Selphar had seen Aunt Alice.

We sat down and looked at one another. There was a singular, pinched
look about my mother's mouth.

"Sarah."

"Yes."

"She says"--and then she told me what she said. She had seen Alice
Stuart in a Western town, seven hundred miles away. Among the living,
she desired to be counted of the dead. And that was all.

My mother paced the room three times back and forth, her hands locked.

"Sarah." There was a chill in her voice--it had been such a gentle
voice!--that froze me. "Sarah, the girl is an impostor."

"Mother!"

She paced the room once more, three times, back and forth. "At any rate,
she is a poor, self-deluded creature. How _can_ she see, seven hundred
miles away, a dead woman who has been an angel all these years? Think!
an _angel_, Sarah! So much better than I, and I--I loved--"

Before or since, I never heard my mother speak like that. She broke off
sharply, and froze back into her chilling voice.

"We will say nothing about this, if you please. I do not believe a word
of it."

We said nothing about it but Selphar did. The delusion, if delusion it
were, clung to her, haunted her, pursued her, week after week. To rid
her of it, or to silence her, was impossible. She added no new facts to
her first statement, but insisted that the long-lost dead was yet alive,
with a quiet pertinacity that it was simply impossible to ridicule,
frighten, threaten, or cross-question out of her. Clara was so
thoroughly alarmed that she would not have slept alone for any
mortal--perhaps not for any immortal--considerations. Winthrop and I
talked the matter over often and gravely when we were alone and in quiet
places. Mother's lips were sealed. From the day when Sel made the first
disclosure, she was never heard once to refer to the matter. A
perceptible haughtiness crept into her manner towards the girl. She even
talked of dismissing her, but repented it, and melted into momentary
gentleness. I could have cried over her that night. I was beginning to
understand what a pitiful struggle her life had become, and how alone
she must be in it. She _would_ not believe--she knew not what. She could
not doubt the girl. And with the conflict even her children could not
intermeddle.

To understand the crisis into which she was brought, the reader must
bear in mind our long habit of belief, not only in Selphar's personal
honesty, but in the infallibility of her mysterious power. Indeed, it
had almost ceased to be mysterious to us, from daily familiarity. We had
come to regard it as the curious working of physical disease, had taken
its results as a matter of course, and had ceased, in common with
converted Creston, to doubt the girl's capacity for seeing anything that
she chose to, at any place.

Thus a year worried on. My mother grew sleepless and pallid. She laughed
often, in a nervous, shallow way, as unlike her as a butterfly is unlike
a sunset; and her face settled into an habitual sharpness and hardness
unutterably painful to me.

Once only I ventured to break into the silence of the haunting thought
that, she knew and we knew, was never escaped by either. "Mother, it
would do no harm for Winthrop to go out West, and--"

She interrupted me sternly: "Sarah, I had not thought you capable of
such childish superstition, I wish that girl and her nonsense had never
come into this house!"--turning sharply away, and out of the room.

But year and struggle ended. They ended at last, as I had prayed every
night and morning of it that they should end. Mother came into my room
one night, locked the door behind her, and walking over to the window,
stood with her face turned from me, and softly spoke my name.

But that was all, for a little while. Then,--"Sick and in suffering,
Sarah! The girl,--she may be right; God Almighty knows! _Sick and in
suffering_, you see! I am going--I think." Then her voice broke.

Creston put on its spectacles and looked wise on learning, the next day,
that Mrs. Dugald had taken the earliest morning train for the West, on
sudden and important business. It was precisely what Creston expected,
and just like the Dugalds for all the world--gone to hunt up material
for that genealogical book, or map, or tree, or something, that they
thought nobody knew they were going to publish. O yes, Creston
understood it perfectly.

Space forbids me to relate in detail the clews which Selphar had given
as to the whereabouts of the wanderer. Her trances, just at this time,
were somewhat scarce and fragmentary, and the information she had
professed to give had come in snatches and very imperfectly,--the trance
being apt to end suddenly at the moment when some important question was
pending, and then, of course, all memory of what she had said, or was
about to say, was gone. The names and appearance of persons and places
necessary to the search had, however, been given with sufficient
distinctness to serve as a guide in my mother's rather chimerical
undertaking. I suppose ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would have
thought her a candidate for the State Lunatic Asylum. Exactly what she
herself expected, hoped, or feared, I think it doubtful if she knew. I
confess to a condition of simple bewilderment, when she was fairly gone,
and Clara and I were left alone with Selphar's ghostly eyes forever on
us. One night I had to lock the poor thing into her garret-room before I
could sleep.

Just three weeks from the day on which mother started for the West, the
coach rattled up to the door, and two women, arm in arm, came slowly up
the walk. The one, erect, royal, with her great steadfast eyes alight;
the other, bent and worn, gray-haired and shallow and dumb, crawling
feebly through the golden afternoon sunshine, as the ghost of a glorious
life might crawl back to its grave.

Mother threw open the door, and stood there like a queen. "Children,
your aunt has come home. She is too tired to talk just now. By and by
she will be glad to see you."

We took her gently upstairs, into the room where the lilies were
mouldering to dust, and laid her down upon the bed. She closed her eyes
wearily, turned her face over to the wall, and said no word.

What was the story of those tired eyes I never asked and I never knew.
Once, as I passed the room, I saw,--and have always been glad that I
saw,--through the open door, the two women lying with their arms about
each other's neck, as they used to do when they were children together,
and above them, still and watchful, the wounded Face that had waited
there so many years for this.

She lingered weakly there, within the restful room, for seven days, and
then one morning we found her with her eyes upon the thorn-crowned Face,
her own quite still and smiling.

A little funeral train wound away one night behind the church, and left
her down among those red-cup mosses that opened in so few months again
to cradle the sister who had loved her. Her name only, by mother's
orders, marked the headstone.

I have given you facts. Explain them as you will. I do not attempt it,
for the simple reason that I cannot.

A word must be said as to the fate of poor Sel, which was mournful
enough. Her trances grew gradually more frequent and erratic, till she
became so thoroughly diseased in mind and body as to be entirely
unfitted for household work, and, in short, nothing but an encumbrance.
We kept her, however, for the sake of charity, and should have done so
till her poor, tormented life wore itself out; but after the advent of a
new servant, and my mother's death, she conceived the idea that she was
a burden, cried over it a few weeks, and at last, one bitter winter's
night, she disappeared. We did not give up all search for her for years,
but nothing was ever heard from her. He, I hope, who permitted life to
be such a terrible mystery to her, has cared for her somehow, and kindly
and well.

In the Gray Goth.

If the wick of the big oil lamp had been cut straight I don't believe it
would ever have happened.

Where is the poker, Johnny? Can't you push back that for'ard log a
little? Dear, dear! Well, it doesn't make much difference, does it?
Something always seems to all your Massachusetts fires; your hickory is
green, and your maple is gnarly, and the worms eat out your oak like a
sponge. I haven't seen anything like what I call a fire,--not since Mary
Ann was married, and I came here to stay. "As long as you live, father,"
she said; and in that very letter she told me I should always have an
open fire, and how she wouldn't let Jacob put in the air-tight in the
sitting-room, but had the fireplace kept on purpose. Mary Ann was a good
girl always, if I remember straight, and I'm sure I don't complain.
Isn't that a pine-knot at the bottom of the basket? There! that's
better.

Let me see; I began to tell you something, didn't I? O yes; about that
winter of '41. I remember now. I declare, I can't get over it, to think
you never heard about it, and you twenty-four year old come Christmas.
You don't know much more, either, about Maine folks and Maine fashions
than you do about China,--though it's small wonder, for the matter of
that, you were such a little shaver when Uncle Jed took you. There were
a great many of us, it seems to me, that year, I 'most forget how
many;--we buried the twins next summer, didn't we?--then there was Mary
Ann, and little Nancy, and--well, coffee was dearer than ever I'd seen
it, I know, about that time, and butter selling for nothing; we just
threw our milk away, and there wasn't any market for eggs; besides
doctor's bills and Isaac to be sent to school; so it seemed to be the
best thing, though your mother took on pretty badly about it at first.
Jedediah has been good to you, I'm sure, and brought you up
religious,--though you've cost him a sight, spending three hundred and
fifty dollars a year at Amherst College.

But, as I was going to say, when I started to talk about '41,--to tell
the truth, Johnny, I'm always a long while coming to it, I believe. I'm
getting to be an old man,--a little of a coward, maybe, and sometimes,
when I sit alone here nights, and think it over, it's just like the
toothache, Johnny. As I was saying, if she had cut that wick straight, I
do believe it wouldn't have happened,--though it isn't that I mean to
lay the blame on her _now_.

I'd been out at work all day about the place, slicking things up for
to-morrow; there was a gap in the barn-yard fence to mend,--I left that
till the last thing, I remember,--I remember everything, some way or
other, that happened that day,--and there was a new roof to put on the
pig-pen, and the grape-vine needed an extra layer of straw, and the
latch was loose on the south barn-door; then I had to go round and take
a last look at the sheep, and toss down an extra forkful for the cows,
and go into the stall to have a talk with Ben, and unbutton the
coop-door to see if the hens looked warm,--just to tuck 'em up, as you
might say. I always felt sort of homesick--though I wouldn't have owned
up to it, not even to Nancy--saying good-by to the creeturs the night
before I went in. There, now! it beats all, to think, you don't know
what I'm talking about, and you a lumberman's son. "Going in" is going
up into the woods, you know, to cut and haul for the winter,--up,
sometimes, a hundred miles deep,--in in the fall and out in the spring;
whole gangs of us shut up there sometimes for six months, then down with
the freshets on the logs, and all summer to work the farm,--a merry sort
of life when you get used to it, Johnny; but it was a great while ago,
and it seems to me as if it must have been very cold.--Isn't there a
little draft coming in at the pantry door?

So when I'd said good-by to the creeturs,--I remember just as plain how
Ben put his great neck on my shoulder and whinnied like a baby,--that
horse know when the season came round and I was going in, just as well
as I did,--I tinkered up the barn-yard fence, and locked the doors,
and went in to supper.

I gave my finger a knock with the hammer, which may have had something
to do with it, for a man doesn't feel very good-natured when he's been
green enough to do a thing like that, and he doesn't like to say it
aches either. But if there is anything I can't bear it is lamp-smoke; it
always did put me out, and I expect it always will. Nancy knew what a
fuss I made about it, and she was always very careful not to hector me
with it. I ought to have remembered that, but I didn't. She had lighted
the company lamp on purpose, too, because it was my last night. I liked
it better than the tallow candle.

So I came in, stamping off the snow, and they were all in there about
the fire,--the twins, and Mary Ann, and the rest; baby was sick, and
Nancy was walking back and forth with him, with little Nancy pulling at
her gown. You were the baby then, I believe, Johnny; but there always
was a baby, and I don't rightly remember. The room was so black with
smoke, that they all looked as if they were swimming round and round in
it. I guess coming in from the cold, and the pain in my finger and all,
it made me a bit sick. At any rate, I threw open the window and blew out
the light, as mad as a hornet.

"Nancy," said I, "this room would strangle a dog, and you might have
known it, if you'd had two eyes to see what you were about. There, now!
I've tipped the lamp over, and you just get a cloth and wipe up the
oil."

"Dear me!" said she, lighting a candle, and she spoke up very soft, too.
"Please, Aaron, don't let the cold in on baby. I'm sorry it was smoking,
but I never knew a thing about it; he's been fretting and taking on so
the last hour, I didn't notice anyway."

"That's just what you ought to have done," says I, madder than ever.
"You know how I hate the stuff, and you ought to have cared more about
me than to choke me up with it this way the last night before going in."

Nancy was a patient, gentle-spoken sort of woman, and would bear a good
deal from a fellow; but she used to fire up sometimes, and that was more
than she could stand. "You don't deserve to be cared about, for speaking
like that!" says she, with her cheeks as red as peat-coals.

That was right before the children. Mary Ann's eyes were as big as
saucers, and little Nancy was crying at the top of her lungs, with the
baby tuning in, so we knew it was time to stop. But stopping wasn't
ending; and folks can look things that they don't say.

We sat down to supper as glum as pump-handles, there were some
fritters--I never knew anybody beat your mother at fritters--smoking hot
off the stove, and some maple molasses in one of the best chiny
tea-cups; I knew well enough it was just on purpose for my last night,
but I never had a word to say, and Nancy crumbed up the children's
bread with a jerk. Her cheeks didn't grow any whiter; it seemed as if
they would blaze right up,--I couldn't help looking at them, for all I
pretended not to, for she looked just like a picture. Some women always
are pretty when they are put out,--and then again, some ain't; it
appears to me there's a great difference in women, very much as there is
in hens; now, there was your aunt Deborah,--but there, I won't get on
that track now, only so far as to say that when she was flustered up she
used to go red all over, something like a piny, which didn't seem to
have just the same effect.

That supper was a very dreary sort of supper, with the baby crying, and
Nancy getting up between the mouthfuls to walk up and down the room with
him; he was a heavy little chap for a ten-month-old, and I think she
must have been tuckered out with him all day. I didn't think about it
then; a man doesn't notice such things when he's angry,--it isn't in
him. I can't say but _she_ would if I'd been in her place. I just eat up
the fritters and the maple molasses,--seems to me I told her she ought
not to use the best chiny cup, but I'm not just sure,--and then I took
my pipe, and sat down in the corner.

I watched her putting the children to bed; they made her a great deal of
bother, squirming off of her lap and running round barefoot. Sometimes I
used to hold them and talk to them and help her a bit, when I felt
good-natured, but I just sat and smoked, and let them alone. I was all
worked up about that lamp-wick, and I thought, you see, if she hadn't
had any feelings for me there was no need of my having any for her--if
she had cut the wick, I'd have taken the babies; she hadn't cut the
wick, and I wouldn't take the babies; she might see it if she wanted to,
and think what she pleased. I had been badly treated, and I meant to
show it.

It is strange, Johnny, it really does seem to me very strange, how easy
it is in this world to be always taking care of our _rights._ I've
thought a great deal about it since I've been growing old, and there
seems to me a good many things we'd better look after fust.

But you see I hadn't found that out in '41, and so I sat in the corner,
and felt very much abused. I can't say but what Nancy had pretty much
the same idea; for when the young ones were all in bed at last, she took
her knitting and sat down the other side of the fire, sort of turning
her head round and looking up at the ceiling, as if she were trying her
best to forget I was there. That was a way she had when I was courting,
and we went along to huskings together, with the moon shining round.

Well, I kept on smoking, and she kept on looking at the ceiling, and
nobody said a word for a while, till by and by the fire burnt down, and
she got up and put on a fresh log.

"You're dreadful wasteful with the wood, Nancy," says I, bound to say
something cross? and that was all I could think of.

"Take care of your own fire, then," says she, throwing the log down and
standing up as straight as she could stand. "I think it's a pity if you
haven't anything better to do, the last night before going in, than to
pick everything I do to pieces this way, and I tired enough to drop,
carrying that great crying child in my arms all day. You ought to be
ashamed of yourself, Aaron Hollis!"

Now if she had cried a little, very like I should have given up, and
that would have been the end of it, for I never could bear to see a
woman cry; it goes against the grain. But your mother wasn't one of the
crying sort, and she didn't feel like it that night.

She just stood up there by the fireplace, as proud as Queen Victory,--I
don't blame her, Johnny,--O no, I don't blame her; she had the right of
it there, I _ought_ to have been ashamed of myself; but a man never
likes to hear that from other folks, and I put my pipe down on the
chimney-shelf so hard I heard it snap like ice, and I stood up too, and
said--but no matter what I said, I guess. A man's quarrels with his wife
always make me think of what the Scripture says about other folks not
intermeddling. They're things, in my opinion, that don't concern anybody
else as a general thing, and I couldn't tell what I said without telling
what she said, and I'd rather not do that. Your mother was as good and
patient-tempered a woman as ever lived, Johnny, and she didn't mean it,
and it was I that set her on. Besides, my words were worst of the two.

Well, well, I'll hurry along just here, for it's not a time I like to
think about; but we had it back and forth there for half an hour, till
we had angered each other up so I couldn't stand it, and I lifted up my
hand,--I would have struck her if she hadn't been a woman.

"Well," says I, "Nancy Hollis, I'm sorry for the day I married you, and
that's the truth, if ever I spoke a true word in my life!"

I wouldn't have told you that now if you could understand the rest
without. I'd give the world, Johnny,--I'd give the world and all those
coupon bonds Jedediah invested for me if I could anyway forget it; but I
said it, and I can't.

Well, I've seen your mother look 'most all sorts of ways in the course
of her life, but I never saw her before, and I never saw her since, look
as she looked that minute. All the blaze went out in her cheeks, as if
somebody had thrown cold water on it, and she stood there stock still,
so white I thought she would drop.

"Aaron--" she began, and stopped to catch her breath,--"Aaron--" but she
couldn't get any further; she just caught hold of a little shawl she had
on with both her hands, as if she thought she could hold herself up by
it, and walked right out of the room. I knew she had gone to bed, for I
heard her go up and shut the door. I stood there a few minutes with my
hands in my pockets, whistling Yankee Doodle. Your mother used to say
men were queer folks, Johnny; they always whistled up the gayest when
they felt the wust. Then I went to the closet and got another pipe, and
I didn't go upstairs till it was smoked out.

When I was a young man, Johnny, I used to be that sort of fellow that
couldn't bear to give up beat. I'd acted like a brute, and I knew it,
but I was too spunky to say so. So I says to myself, "If she won't make
up first, I won't, and that's the end on't." Very likely she said the
same thing, for your mother was a spirited sort of woman when her temper
_was_ up; so there we were, more like enemies sworn against each other
than man and wife who had loved each other true for fifteen years,--a
whole winter, and danger, and death perhaps, coming between us, too.

It may seem very queer to you, Johnny,--it did to me when I was your
age, and didn't know any more than you do,--how folks can work
themselves up into great quarrels out of such little things; but they
do, and into worse, if it's a man who likes his own way, and a woman
that knows how to talk. It's my opinion, two thirds of all the divorce
cases in the law-books just grow up out of things no bigger than that
lamp-wick.

But how people that ever loved each other could come to hard words like
that, you don't see? Well, ha, ha! Johnny, that amuses me, that really
does amuse me, for I never saw a young man nor a young woman
either,--and young men and young women in general are very much like
fresh-hatched chickens, to my mind, and know just about as much of the
world, Johnny,--well, I never saw one yet who didn't say that very
thing. And what's more, I never saw one who could get it into his head
that old folks knew better.

But I say I had loved your mother true, Johnny, and she had loved me
true, for more than fifteen years; and I loved her more the fifteenth
year than I did the first, and we couldn't have got along without each
other, any more than you could get along if somebody cut your heart
right out. We had laughed together and cried together; we had been sick,
and we'd been well together; we'd had our hard times and our pleasant
times right along, side by side; we'd baptized the babies, and we'd
buried 'm, holding on to each other's hand; we had grown along year
after year, through ups and downs and downs and ups, just like one
person, and there wasn't any more dividing of us. But for all that we'd
been put out, and we'd had our two ways, and we had spoken our sharp
words like any other two folks, and this wasn't our first quarrel by any
means.

I tell you, Johnny, young folks they start in life with very pretty
ideas,--very pretty. But take it as a general thing, they don't know any
more what they're talking about than they do about each other, and they
don't know any more about each other than they do about the man in the
moon. They begin very nice, with their new carpets and teaspoons, and a
little mending to do, and coming home early evenings to talk; but by and
by the shine wears off. Then come the babies, and worry and wear and
temper. About that time they begin to be a little acquainted, and to
find out that there are two wills and two sets of habits to be fitted
somehow. It takes them anywhere along from one year to three to get
jostled down together. As for smoothing off, there's more or less of
that to be done always.

Well, I didn't sleep very well that night, dropping into naps and waking
up. The baby was worrying over his teeth every half-hour, and Nancy
getting up to walk him off to sleep in her arms,--it was the only way
you _would_ be hushed up, and you'd lie and yell till somebody did it.

Now, it wasn't many times since we'd been married that I had let her do
that thing all night long. I used to have a way of getting up to take my
turn, and sending her off to sleep. It isn't a man's business, some
folks say. I don't know anything about that; maybe, if I'd been broiling
my brain in book learning all day till come night, and I was hard put to
it to get my sleep anyhow, like the parson there, it wouldn't; but all
I know is, what if I had been breaking my back in the potato-patch since
morning? so she'd broken her's over the oven; and what if I did need
nine hours' sound sleep? I could chop and saw without it next day, just
as well as she could do the ironing, to say nothing of my being a great
stout fellow,--there wasn't a chap for ten miles round with my
muscle,--and she with those blue veins on her forehead. Howsomever that
may be, I wasn't used to letting her do it by herself, and so I lay with
my eyes shut, and pretended that I was asleep; for I didn't feel like
giving in, and speaking up gentle, not about that nor anything else.

I could see her though, between my eyelashes, and I lay there, every
time I woke up, and watched her walking back and forth, back and forth,
up and down, with the heavy little fellow in her arms, all night long.

Sometimes, Johnny, when I'm gone to bed now of a winter night, I think I
see her in her white nightgown with her red-plaid shawl pinned over her
shoulders and over the baby, walking up and down, and up and down. I
shut my eyes, but there she is, and I open them again, but I see her all
the same.

I was off very early in the morning; I don't think it could have been
much after three o'clock when I woke up. Nancy had my breakfast all laid
out overnight, except the coffee, and we had fixed it that I was to make
up the fire, and get off without waking her, if the baby was very bad.
At least, that was the way I wanted it; but she stuck to it she should
be up,--that was before there'd been any words between us.

The room was very gray and still,--I remember just how it looked, with
Nancy's clothes on a chair, and the baby's shoes lying round. She had
got him off to sleep in his cradle, and had dropped into a nap, poor
thing! with her face as white as the sheet, from watching.

I stopped when I was dressed, half-way out of the room, and looked round
at it,--it was so white, Johnny! It would be a long time before I should
see it again,--five months were a long time; then there was the risk,
coming down in the freshets, and the words I'd said last night. I
thought, you see, if I should kiss it once,--I needn't wake her
up,--maybe I should go off feeling better. So I stood there looking: she
was lying so still, I couldn't see any more stir to her than if she had
her breath held in. I wish I had done it, Johnny,--I can't get over
wishing I'd done it, yet. But I was just too proud, and I turned round
and went out, and shut the door.

We were going to meet down at the post-office, the whole gang of us, and
I had quite a spell to walk. I was going in on Bob Stokes's team. I
remember how fast I walked with my hands in my pockets, looking along up
at the stars,--the sun was putting them out pretty fast,--and trying not
to think of Nancy. But I didn't think of anything else.

It was so early, that there wasn't many folks about to see us off; but
Bob Stokes's wife,--she lived nigh the office, just across the
road,--she was there to say good-by, kissing of him, and crying on his
shoulder. I don't know what difference that should make with Bob Stokes,
but I snapped him up well, when he came along, and said good morning.

There were twenty-one of us just, on that gang, in on contract for Dove
and Beadle. Dove and Beadle did about the heaviest thing on woodland of
anybody, about that time. Good, steady men we were, most of us,--none of
your blundering Irish, that wouldn't know a maple from a hickory, with
their gin-bottles in their pockets,--but our solid, Down-East Yankee
heads, owning their farms all along the river, with schooling enough to
know what they were about 'lection day. You didn't catch any of _us_
voting your new-fangled tickets when he had meant to go up on Whig, for
want of knowing the difference, nor visa vussy. To say nothing of Bob
Stokes, and Holt, and me, and another fellow,--I forget his name,--being
members in good and reg'lar standing, and paying in our five dollars to
the parson every quarter, charitable.

Yes, though I say it that shouldn't say it, we were as fine a looking
gang as any in the county, starting off that morning in our red
uniform,--Nancy took a sight of pains with my shirt, sewing it up stout,
for fear it should bother me ripping, and I with nobody to take a stitch
for me all winter. The boys went off in good spirits, singing till they
were out of sight of town, and waving their caps at their wives and
babies standing in the window along on the way. I didn't sing. I thought
the wind blew too hard,--seems to me that was the reason,--I'm sure
there must have been a reason, for I had a voice of my own in those
days, and had led the choir perpetual for five years.

We weren't going in very deep; Dove and Beadle's lots lay about thirty
miles from the nearest house; and a straggling, lonely sort of place
that was too, five miles out of the village, with nobody but a dog and a
deaf old woman in it. Sometimes, as I was telling you, we had been in a
hundred miles from any human creature but ourselves.

It took us two days to get there though, with the oxen; and the teams
were loaded down well, with so many axes and the pork-barrels;--I don't
know anything like pork for hefting down more than you expect it to,
reasonable. It was one of your ugly gray days, growing dark at four
o'clock, with snow in the air, when we hauled up in the lonely place.
The trees were blazed pretty thick, I remember, especially the pines;
Dove and Beadle always had that done up prompt in October. It's pretty
work going in blazing while the sun is warm, and the woods like a great
bonfire with the maples. I used to like it, but your mother wouldn't
hear of it when she could help herself, it kept me away so long.

It's queer, Johnny, how we do remember things that ain't of no account;
but I remember, as plainly as if it were yesterday morning, just how
everything looked that night, when the teams came up, one by one, and we
went to work spry to get to rights before the sun went down.

There were three shanties,--they don't often have more than two or three
in one place,--they were empty, and the snow had drifted in; Bob
Stokes's oxen were fagged out with their heads hanging down, and the
horses were whinnying for their supper. Holt had one of his great
brush-fires going,--there was nobody like Holt for making fires,--and
the boys were hurrying round in their red shirts, shouting at the oxen,
and singing a little, some of them low, under their breath, to keep
their spirits up. There was snow as far as you could see,--down the
cart-path, and all around, and away into the woods; and there was snow
in the sky now, setting in for a regular nor'easter. The trees stood up
straight all around without any leaves, and under the bushes it was as
black as pitch.

"Five months," said I to myself,--"five months!"

"What in time's the matter with you, Hollis?" says Bob Stokes, with a
great slap on my arm; "you're giving that 'ere ox molasses on his hay!"

Sure enough I was, and he said I acted like a dazed creatur, and very
likely I did. But I couldn't have told Bob the reason. You see, I knew
Nancy was just drawing up her little rocking-chair--the one with the red
cushion--close by the fire, sitting there with the children to wait for
the tea to boil. And I knew--I couldn't help knowing, if I'd tried hard
for it--how she was crying away softly in the dark, so that none of
them could see her, to think of the words we'd said, and I gone in
without ever making of them up. I was sorry for them then. O Johnny, I
was sorry, and she was thirty miles away. I'd got to be sorry five
months, thirty miles away, and couldn't let her know.

The boys said I was poor company that first week, and I shouldn't wonder
if I was. I couldn't seem to get over it any way, to think I couldn't
let her know.

If I could have sent her a scrap of a letter, or a message, or
something, I should have felt better. But there wasn't any chance of
that this long time, unless we got out of pork or fodder, and had to
send down,--which we didn't expect to, for we'd laid in more than usual.

We had two pretty rough weeks' work to begin with, for the worst storms
of the season set in, and kept in, and I never saw their like, before or
since. It seemed as if there'd never be an end to them. Storm after
storm, blow after blow, freeze after freeze; half a day's sunshine, and
then at it again! We were well tired of it before they stopped; it made
the boys homesick.

However, we kept at work pretty brisk,--lumber-men aren't the fellows to
be put out for a snow-storm,--cutting and hauling and sawing, out in
the sleet and wind. Bob Stokes froze his left foot that second week, and
I was frost-bitten pretty badly myself. Cullen--he was the boss--he was
well out of sorts, I tell you, before the sun came out, and cross enough
to bite a tenpenny nail in two.

But when the sun _is_ out, it isn't so bad a kind of life, after all. At
work all day, with a good hot dinner in the middle; then back to the
shanties at dark, to as rousing a fire and tiptop swagan as anybody
could ask for. Holt was cook that season, and Holt couldn't be beaten on
his swagan.

Now you don't mean to say you don't know what swagan is? Well, well! To
think of it! All I have to say is, you don't know what's good then.
Beans and pork and bread and molasses,--that's swagan,--all stirred up
in a great kettle, and boiled together; and I don't know anything--not
even your mother's fritters--I'd give more for a taste of now. We just
about lived on that; there's nothing you can cut and haul all day on
like swagan. Besides that, we used to have doughnuts,--you don't know
what doughnuts are here in Massachusetts; as big as a dinner-plate those
doughnuts were, and--well, a little hard, perhaps. They used to have it
about in Bangor that we used them for clock pendulums, but I don't know
about that.

I used to think a great deal about Nancy nights, when we were sitting up
by the fire,--we had our fire right in the middle of the hut, you know,
with a hole in the roof to let the smoke out. When supper was eaten, the
boys all sat up around it, and told stories, and sang, and cracked their
jokes; then they had their backgammon and cards; we got sleepy early,
along about nine or ten o'clock, and turned in under the roof with our
blankets. The roof sloped down, you know, to the ground; so we lay with
our heads in under the little eaves, and our feet to the fire,--ten or
twelve of us to a shanty, all round in a row. They built the huts up
like a baby's cob-house, with the logs fitted in together. I used to
think a great deal about your mother, as I was saying; sometimes I would
lie awake when the rest were off as sound as a top, and think about her.
Maybe it was foolish, and I'm sure I wouldn't have told anybody of it;
but I couldn't get rid of the notion that something might happen to her
or to me before five months were out, and I with those words unforgiven.

Then, perhaps, when I went to sleep, I would dream about her, walking
back and forth, up and down, in her nightgown and little red shawl, with
the great heavy baby in her arms.

So it went along till come the last of January, when one day I saw the
boys all standing round in a heap, and talking.

"What's the matter?" says I.

"Pork's given out," says Bob, with a whistle. "Beadle got that last lot
from Jenkins there, his son-in-law, and it's sp'ilt. I could have told
him that beforehand. Never knew Jenkins to do the fair thing by anybody
yet."

"Who's going down?" said I, stopping short. I felt the blood run all
over my face, like a woman's.

"Cullen hasn't made up his mind yet," says Bob, walking off.

Now you see there wasn't a man on the ground who wouldn't jump at the
chance to go; it broke up the winter for them, and sometimes they could
run in home for half an hour, driving by; so there wasn't much of a hope
for me. But I went straight to Mr. Cullen.

"Too late! Just promised Jim Jacobs," said he, speaking up quick; it was
just business to him, you know.

I turned off, and I didn't say a word. I wouldn't have believed it, I
never would have believed it, that I could have felt so cut up about
such a little thing. Cullen looked round at me sharp.

"Hilloa, Hollis!" said he. "What's to pay?"

"Nothing, thank you, sir," says I, and walked off, whistling.

I had a little talk with Jim alone. He said he would take good care of
anything I'd give him, and carry it straight. So when night came I went
and borrowed Mr. Cullen's pencil, and Holt tore me off a bit of clean
brown paper he found in the flour-barrel, and I went off among the trees
with it alone. I built a little fire for myself out of a
huckleberry-bush, and sat down there on the snow to write. I couldn't do
it in the shanty, with the noise and singing. The little brown paper
wouldn't hold much; but these were the words I wrote,--I remember every
one of them,--it is curious now I should, and that more than twenty
years ago:--

"Dear Nancy,"--that was it,--"Dear Nancy, I can't get over it, and I
take them all back. And if anything happens coming down on the logs--"

I couldn't finish that anyhow, so I just wrote "Aaron" down in the
corner, and folded the brown paper up. It didn't look any more like
"Aaron" than it did like "Abimelech," though; for I didn't see a single
letter I wrote,--not one.

After that I went to bed, and wished I was Jim Jacobs.

Next morning somebody woke me up with a push, and there was the boss.

"Why, Mr. Cullen!" says I, with a jump.

"Hurry up, man, and eat your breakfast," said he; "Jacobs is down sick
with his cold."

"_Oh!_" said I.

"You and the pork must be back here day after to-morrow,--so be spry,"
said he.

I rather think I was, Johnny.

It was just eight o'clock when I started; it took some time to get
breakfast, and feed the nags, and get orders. I stood there, slapping
the snow with my whip, crazy to be off, hearing the last of what Mr.
Cullen had to say.

They gave me the two horses,--we hadn't but two,--oxen are tougher for
going in, as a general thing,--and the lightest team on the ground; it
was considerably lighter than Bob Stokes's. If it hadn't been for the
snow, I might have put the thing through in two days, but the snow was
up to the creatures' knees in the shady places all along; off from the
road, in among the gullies, you could stick a four-foot measure down
anywhere. So they didn't look for me back before Wednesday night.

"I must have that pork Wednesday night sure," says Cullen.

"Well, sir," says I, "you shall have it Wednesday noon, Providence
permitting; and you shall have it Wednesday night anyway."

"You will have a storm to do it in, I'm afraid," said he, looking at the
clouds, just as I was whipping up. "You're all right on the road, I
suppose?"

"All right," said I; and I'm sure I ought to have been, for the times
I'd been over it.

Bess and Beauty--they were the horses, and of all the ugly nags that
ever I saw Beauty was the ugliest--started off on a round trot, slewing
along down the hill; they knew they were going home just as well as I
did. I looked back, as we turned the corner, to see the boys standing
round in their red shirts, with the snow behind them, and the fire and
the shanties. I felt a mite lonely when I couldn't see them any more;
the snow was so dead still, and there were thirty miles of it to cross
before I could see human face again.

The clouds had an ugly look,--a few flakes had fallen already,--and the
snow was purple, deep in as far as you could see under the trees.
Something made me think of Ben Gurnell, as I drove on, looking along
down the road to keep it straight. You never heard about it? Poor Ben!
Poor Ben! It was in '37, that was; he had been out hunting up blazed
trees, they said, and wandered away somehow into the Gray Goth, and went
over,--it was two hundred feet; they didn't find him, not till
spring,--just a little heap of bones; his wife had them taken home and
buried, and by and by they had to take her away to a hospital in
Portland,--she talked so horribly, and thought she saw bones round
everywhere.

There is no place like the woods for bringing a storm down on you quick;
the trees are so thick you don't mind the first few flakes, till, first
you know, there's a whirl of 'em, and the wind is up.

I was minding less about it than usual, for I was thinking of
Nannie,--that's what I used to call her, Johnny, when she was a girl,
but it seems a long time ago, that does. I was thinking how surprised
she'd be, and pleased. I knew she would be pleased. I didn't think so
poorly of her as to suppose she wasn't just as sorry now as I was for
what had happened. I knew well enough how she would jump and throw down
her sewing with a little scream, and run and put her arms about my neck
and cry, and couldn't help herself.

So I didn't mind about the snow, for planning it all out, till all at
once I looked up, and something slashed into my eyes and stung me,--it
was sleet.

"Oho!" said I to myself, with a whistle,--it was a very long whistle,
Johnny; I knew well enough then it was no play-work I had before me till
the sun went down, nor till morning either.

That was about noon,--it couldn't have been half an hour since I'd eaten
my dinner; I eat it driving, for I couldn't bear to waste time.

The road wasn't broken there an inch, and the trees were thin; there'd
been a clearing there years ago, and wide, white, level places wound off
among the trees; one looked as much like a road as another, for the
matter of that. I pulled my visor down over my eyes to keep the sleet
out,--after they're stung too much they're good for nothing to see with,
and I _must_ see, if I meant to keep that road.

It began to be cold. You don't know what it is to be cold, you don't,
Johnny, in the warm gentleman's life you've lived. I was used to Maine
forests, and I was used to January, but that was what I call cold.

The wind blew from the ocean, straight as an arrow. The sleet blew every
way,--into your eyes, down your neck, in like a knife into your cheeks.
I could feel the snow crunching in under the runners, crisp, turned to
ice in a minute. I reached out to give Bess a cut on the neck, and the
sleeve of my coat was stiff as pasteboard before I bent my elbow up
again.

If you looked up at the sky, your eyes were shut with a snap as if
somebody'd shot them. If you looked in under the trees, you could see
the icicles a minute, and the purple shadows. If you looked straight
ahead, you couldn't see a thing.

By and by I thought I had dropped the reins, I looked at my hands, and
there I was holding them tight. I knew then that it was time to get out
and walk.

I didn't try much after that to look ahead; it was of no use, for the
sleet was fine, like needles, twenty of 'em in your eye at a wink; then
it was growing dark. Bess and Beauty knew the road as well as I did, so
I had to trust to them. I thought I must be coming near the clearing
where I'd counted on putting up overnight, in case I couldn't reach the
deaf old woman's.

There was a man just out of Bangor the winter before, walking just so
beside his team, and he kept on walking, some folks said, after the
breath was gone, and they found him frozen up against the sleigh-poles.
I would have given a good deal if I needn't have thought of that just
then. But I did, and I kept walking on.

Pretty soon Bess stopped short. Beauty was pulling on,--Beauty always
did pull on,--but she stopped too. I couldn't stop so easily, so I
walked along like a machine, up on a line with the creaturs' ears. I
_did_ stop then, or you never would have heard this story, Johnny.

Two paces,--and those two hundred feet shot down like a plummet. A great
cloud of snow-flakes puffed up over the edge. There were rocks at my
right hand, and rocks at my left. There was the sky overhead. I was in
the Gray Goth!

I sat down as weak as a baby. If I didn't think of Ben Gurnell then, I
never thought of him. It roused me up a bit, perhaps, for I had the
sense left to know that I couldn't afford to sit down just yet, and I
remembered a shanty that I must have passed without seeing; it was just
at the opening of the place where the rocks narrowed, built, as they
build their light-houses, to warn folks to one side. There was a log or
something put up after Gurnell went over, but it was of no account,
coming on it suddenly. There was no going any farther that night, that
was clear; so I put about into the hut, and got my fire going, and Bess
and Beauty and I, we slept together.

It was an outlandish name to give it, seems to me, anyway. I don't know
what a Goth is, Johnny; maybe you do. There was a great figger up on the
rock, about eight feet high; some folks thought it looked like a man. I
never thought so before, but that night it did kind of stare in through
the door as natural as life.

When I woke up in the morning I thought I was on fire. I stirred and
turned over, and I was ice. My tongue was swollen up so I couldn't
swallow without strangling. I crawled up to my feet, and every bone in
me was stiff as a shingle.

Bess was looking hard at me, whinnying for her breakfast. "Bess," says
I, very slow, "we must get home--to-night--_any_--how."

I pushed open the door. It creaked out into a great drift, and slammed
back. I squeezed through and limped out. The shanty stood up a little,
in the highest part of the Goth. I went down a little,--I went as far as
I could go. There was a pole lying there, blown down in the night; it
came about up to my head. I sunk it into the snow, and drew it up.

Just six feet.

I went back to Bess and Beauty, and I shut the door. I told them I
couldn't help it,--something ailed my arms,--I couldn't shovel them out
to-day. I must lie down and wait till to-morrow.

I waited till to-morrow. It snowed all day, and it snowed all night. It
was snowing when I pushed the door out again into the drift. I went back
and lay down. I didn't seem to care.

The third day the sun came out, and I thought about Nannie. I was going
to surprise her. She would jump up and run and put her arms about my
neck. I took the shovel, and crawled out on my hands and knees. I dug
it down, and fell over on it like a baby.

After that, I understood. I'd never had a fever in my life, and it's not
strange that I shouldn't have known before.

It came all over me in a minute, I think. I couldn't shovel through.
Nobody could hear. I might call, and I might shout. By and by the fire
would go out. Nancy would not come. Nancy did not know. Nancy and I
should never kiss and make up now.

I struck my arm out into the air, and shouted out her name, and yelled
it out. Then I crawled out once more into the drift.

I tell you, Johnny, I was a stout-hearted man, who'd never known a fear.
I could freeze. I could burn up there alone in the horrid place with
fever. I could starve. It wasn't death nor awfulness I couldn't
face,--not that, not _that_; but I loved her true, I say,--I loved her
true, and I'd spoken my last words to her, my very last; I had left her
_those_ to remember, day in and day out, and year upon year, as long as
she remembered her husband, as long as she remembered anything.

I think I must have gone pretty nearly mad with the fever and the
thinking. I fell down there like a log, and lay groaning. "God Almighty!
God Almighty!" over and over, not knowing what it was that I was saying,
till the words strangled in my throat.

Next day, I was too weak so much as to push open the door. I crawled
around the hut on my knees with my hands up over my head, shouting out
as I did before, and fell, a helpless heap, into the corner; after that
I never stirred.

How many days had gone, or how many nights, I had no more notion than
the dead. I knew afterwards; when I knew how they waited and expected
and talked and grew anxious, and sent down home to see if I was there,
and how she--But no matter, no matter about that.

I used to scoop up a little snow when I woke up from the stupors. The
bread was the other side of the fire; I couldn't reach round. Beauty eat
it up one day; I saw her. Then the wood was used up. I clawed out chips
with my nails from the old rotten logs the shanty was made of, and kept
up a little blaze. By and by I couldn't pull any more. Then there were
only some coals,--then a little spark. I blew at that spark a long
while,--I hadn't much breath. One night it went out, and the wind blew
in. One day I opened my eyes, and Bess had fallen down in the corner,
dead and stiff. Beauty had pushed out of the door somehow and gone. I
shut up my eyes. I don't think I cared about seeing Bess,--I can't
remember very well.

Sometimes I thought Nancy was there in the plaid shawl, walking round
the ashes where the spark went out. Then again I thought Mary Ann was
there, and Isaac, and the baby. But they never were. I used to wonder
if I wasn't dead, and hadn't made a mistake about the place that I was
going to.

One day there was a noise. I had heard a great many noises, so I didn't
take much notice. It came up crunching on the snow, and I didn't know
but it was Gabriel or somebody with his chariot. Then I thought more
likely it was a wolf.

Pretty soon I looked up, and the door was open; some men were coming in,
and a woman. She was ahead of them all, she was; she came in with a
great spring, and had my head against her neck, and her arm holding me
up, and her cheek down to mine, with her dear, sweet, warm breath all
over me; and that was all I knew.

Well, there was brandy, and there was a fire, and there were blankets,
and there was hot water, and I don't know what; but warmer than all the
rest I felt her breath against my cheek, and her arms about my neck, and
her long hair, which she had wrapped all in, about my hands.

So by and by my voice came. "Nannie!" said I.

"O don't!" said she, and first I knew she was crying.

"But I will," says I, "for I'm sorry."

"Well, so am I," says she.

Said I, "I thought I was dead, and hadn't made up, Nannie."

"O _dear_!" said she; and down fell a great hot splash right on my face.

Says I, "It was all me, for I ought to have gone back and kissed you."

"No, it was _me_" said she, "for I wasn't asleep, not any such thing. I
peeked out, this way, through my lashes, to see if you wouldn't come
back. I meant to wake up then. Dear me!" says she, "to think what a
couple of fools we were, now!"

"Nannie," says I, "you can let the lamp smoke all you want to!"

"Aaron--" she began, just as she had begun that other night,--"Aaron--"
but she didn't finish, and--Well, well, no matter; I guess you don't
want to hear any more, do you?

But sometimes I think, Johnny, when it comes my time to go,--if ever it
does,--I've waited a good while for it,--the first thing I shall see
will be her face, looking as it looked at me just then.

Calico.

It was about time for the four-o'clock train.

After all, I wonder if it is worth telling,--such a simple, plotless
record of a young girl's life, made up of Mondays and Tuesdays and
Wednesdays, like yours or mine. Sharley was so exactly like other
people! How can it be helped that nothing remarkable happened to her?
But you would like the story?

It was about time for the four-o'clock train, then.

Sharley, at the cost of half a sugar-bowl (never mind syntax; you know I
mean the sugar, not the glass), had enticed Moppet to betake himself out
of sight and out of mind till somebody should signify a desire for his
engaging presence; had steered clear of Nate and Methuselah, and was
standing now alone on the back doorsteps opposite the chaise-house. One
could see a variety of things from those doorsteps,--the chaise-house,
for instance, with the old, solid, square-built wagon rolled into it
(Sharley passed many a long "mending morning" stowed in among the
cushions of that old wagon); the great sweet-kept barn, where the sun
stole in warm at the chinks and filtered through the hay; the well-curb
folded in by a shadow; the wood-pile, and the chickens, and the
kitchen-garden; a little slope, too, with a maple on it and shades of
brown and gold upon the grass; brown and golden tints across the hills,
and a sky of blue and gold to dazzle one. Then there was a flock of
robins dipping southward. There was also the railroad.

Sharley may have had her dim consciousness of the cosey barn and
chicken's chirp, of brown and gold and blue and dazzle and glory; but
you don't suppose _that_ was what she had outgeneralled Moppet and
stolen the march upon Nate and Methuselah for. The truth is, that the
child had need of none of these things--neither skies nor dazzle nor
glory--that golden autumn afternoon. Had the railroad bounded the
universe just then, she would have been content. For Sharley was only a
girl,--a very young, not very happy, little girl,--and Halcombe Dike was
coming home to spend the Sunday.

Halcombe Dike,--her old friend Halcombe Dike. She said the words over,
apologizing a bit to herself for being there to watch that railroad. Hal
used to be good to her when she was bothered with the children and more
than half tired of life. "Keep up good courage, Sharley," he would say.
For the long summer he had not been here to say it. And to-night he
would be here. To-night--to-night! Why should not one be glad when one's
old friends come back?

Mrs. Guest, peering through the pantry window, observed--and observed
with some motherly displeasure, which she would have expressed had it
not been too much trouble to open the window--that Sharley had put on
her barbe,--that black barbe with the pink watered ribbons run through
it. So extravagant in Sharley! Sharley would fain have been so
extravagant as to put on her pink muslin too this afternoon; she had
been more than half inclined to cry because she could not; but as it was
not orthodox in Green Valley to wear one's "best clothes" on week-days,
except at picnics or prayer-meetings, she had submitted, sighing, to her
sprigged calico. It would have been worth while, though, to have seen
her half an hour ago up in her room under the eaves, considering the
question; she standing there with the sleeves of her dressing-sack
fallen away from her pink, bare arms, and the hair clinging loose and
moist to her bare white neck; to see her smooth the shimmering
folds,--there were rose-buds on that muslin,--and look and long, hang it
up, and turn away. Why could there not be a little more rose-bud and
shimmer in people's lives! "Seems to me it's all calico!" cried Sharley.

Then to see her overturning her ribbon-box! Nobody but a girl knows how
girls dream over their ribbons.

"He is coming!" whispered Sharley to the little bright barbe, and to the
little bright face that flushed and fluttered at her in the glass,--"He
is coming!"

Sharley looked well, waiting there in the calico and lace upon the
doorstep. It is not everybody who would look well in calico and lace;
yet if you were to ask me, I could not tell you how pretty Sharley is,
or if she is pretty at all. I have a memory of soft hair--brown, I
think--and wistful eyes; and that I never saw her without a desire to
stroke her, and make her pur as I would a kitten.

How stiff and stark and black the railroad lay on its yellow ridge!
Sharley drew her breath when the sudden four-o'clock whistle smote the
air, and a faint, far trail of smoke puffed through the woods, and wound
over the barren outline.

Her mother, seeing her steal away through the kitchen-garden, and down
the slope, called after her:--

"Charlotte! going to walk? I wish you'd let the baby go too. Well, she
doesn't hear!"

I will not assert that Sharley did not hear. To be frank, she was rather
tired of that baby.

There was a foot-path through the brown and golden grass, and Sharley
ran over it, under the maple, which was dropping yellow leaves, and down
to the knot of trees which lined the farther walls. There was a nook
here--she knew just where--into which one might creep, tangled in with
the low-hanging green of apple and spruce, and wound about with
grape-vines. Stooping down, careful not to catch that barbe upon the
brambles, and careful not to soil so much as a sprig of the clean light
calico, Sharley hid herself in the shadow. She could see unseen now the
great puffs of purple smoke, the burning line of sandy bank, the
station, and the uphill road to the village. Oddly enough, some old
Scripture words--Sharley was not much in the habit of quoting
Scripture--came into her thoughts just as she had curled herself
comfortably up beside the wall, her watching face against the
grape-leaves: "But what went ye out for to see?" "What went ye out for
to see?" She went on, dreamily finishing, "A prophet? Yea, I say unto
you, and more than a prophet," and stopped, scarlet. What had prophets
to do with her old friend Halcombe Dike?

Ah, but he was coming! he was coming! To Sharley's eyes the laboring,
crazy locomotive which puffed him asthmatically up to the little depot
was a benevolent dragon,--if there were such things as benevolent
dragons,--very horrible, and she was very much afraid of it; but very
gracious, and she should like to go out and pat it on the shoulder.

The train slackened, jarred, and stopped. An old woman with thirteen
bundles climbed out laboriously. Two small boys turned somersaults from
the platform. Sharley strained her wistful eyes till they ached. There
was nobody else. Sharley was very young, and very much disappointed, and
she cried. The glory had died from the skies. The world had gone out.

She was sitting there all in a heap, her face in her hands, and her
heart in her foolish eyes, when a step sounded near, and a voice humming
an old army song. She knew it; he had taught it to her himself. She knew
the step; for she had long ago trained her slippered feet to keep pace
with it. He had stepped from the wrong side of the car, perhaps, or her
eager eyes had missed him; at any rate here he was,--a young man, with
honest eyes, and mouth a little grave; a very plainly dressed young
man,--his coat was not as new as Sharley's calico,--but a young man with
a good step of his own,--strong, elastic,--and a nervous hand.

He passed, humming his army song, and never knew how the world lighted
up again within a foot of him. He passed so near that Sharley by
stretching out her hand could have touched him,--so near that she could
hear the breath he drew. He was thinking to himself, perhaps, that no
one had come from home to meet him, and he had been long away; but then,
it was not his mother's fashion of welcome, and quickening his pace at
the thought of her, he left the tangle of green behind, and the little
wet face crushed breathless up against the grape-leaves, and was out of
sight and knew nothing.

Sharley sprang up and bounded home. Her mother opened her languid eyes
wide when the child came in.

"Dear me, Charlotte, how you do go chirping and hopping round, and me
with this great baby and my sick-headache! _I_ can't chirp and hop. You
look as if somebody'd set you on fire! What's the matter with you,
child?"

What was the matter, indeed! Sharley, in a little spasm of
penitence,--one can afford to be penitent when one is happy,--took the
baby and went away to think about it. Surely he would come to see her
to-night; he did not often come home without seeing Sharley; and he had
been long away. At any rate he was here; in this very Green Valley where
the days had dragged so drearily without him; his eyes saw the same sky
that hers saw; his breath drank the same sweet evening wind; his feet
trod the roads that she had trodden yesterday, and would tread again
to-morrow. But I will not tell them any more of this,--shall I, Sharley?

She threw her head back and looked up, as she walked to and fro through
the yard with the heavy baby fretting on her shoulder. The skies were
aflame now, for the sun was dropping slowly. "He is here!" they said. A
belated robin took up the word: "He is here!" The yellow maple glittered
all over with it: "Sharley, he is here!"

"The butter is here," called her mother relevantly from the house. "The
butter is here now, and it's time to see about supper, Charlotte."

"More calico!" said impatient Sharley, and she gave the baby a jerk.

Whether he came or whether he did not come, there was no more time for
Sharley to dream that night. In fact, there seldom was any time to dream
in Mrs. Guest's household. Mrs. Guest believed in keeping people busy.
She was busy enough herself when her head did not ache. When it did, it
was the least she could do to see that other people were busy.

So Sharley had the table to set, and the biscuit to bake, and the tea to
make, and the pears to pick over; she must run upstairs to bring her
mother a handkerchief; she must hurry for her father's clothes-brush
when he came in tired, and not so good-humored as he might be, from his
store; she must stop to rebuild the baby's block-house, that Moppet had
kicked over, and snap Moppet's dirty, dimpled fingers for kicking it
over, and endure the shriek that Moppet set up therefor. She must
suggest to Methuselah that he could find, perhaps, a more suitable
book-mark for Robinson Crusoe than his piece of bread and molasses, and
intimate doubts as to the propriety of Nate's standing on the
table-cloth and sitting on the toast-rack. And then Moppet was at that
baby again, dropping very cold pennies down his neck. They must be made
presentable for supper, too, Moppet and Nate and Methuselah,--Methuselah,
Nate, and Moppet; brushed and washed and dusted and coaxed and scolded
and borne with. There was no end to it. Would there ever be any end to
it? Sharley sometimes asked of her weary thoughts. Sharley's life, like
the lives of most girls at her age, was one great unanswered question.
It grew tiresome occasionally, as monologues are apt to do.

"I'm going to holler to-night," announced Moppet at supper, pausing in
the midst of his berry-cake, by way of diversion, to lift the cat up by
her tail. "I'm going to holler awful, and make you sit up and tell me
about that little boy that ate the giant, and Cinderella,--how she lived
in the stove-pipe,--and that man that builded his house out of a bungle
of straws: and--well, there's some more, but I don't remember 'em just
now, you know."

"O Moppet!"

"I am," glared Moppet over his mug. "You made me put on a clean collar.
You see if I don't holler an' holler an' holler an' keep-a-hollerin'!"

Sharley's heart sank; but she patiently cleared away her dishes, mixed
her mother's ipecac, read her father his paper, went upstairs with the
children, treated Moppet with respect as to his buttons and boot-lacing,
and tremblingly bided her time.

"Well," condescended that young gentleman, before his prayers were over,
"I b'lieve--give us our debts--I'll keep that hollerin'--forever 'n
ever--Namen--till to-morrow night. I ain't a--bit--sleepy, but--" And
nobody heard anything more from Moppet.

The coast was clear now, and happy Sharley, with bright cheeks, took her
little fall hat that she was trimming, and sat down on the front
doorsteps; sat there to wait and watch, and hope and dream and flutter,
and sat in vain. Twilight crept up the path, up to her feet, folded her
in; the warm color of her plaided ribbons faded away under her eyes, and
dropped from her listless fingers; with them had faded her bit of a hope
for that night; Hal always came before dark.

"Who cares?" said Sharley, with a toss of her soft, brown head. Somebody
did care nevertheless. Somebody winked hard as she went upstairs.

However, she could light a lamp and finish her hat. That was one
comfort. It always _is_ a comfort to finish one's hat. Girls have
forgotten graver troubles than Sharley's in the excitement of hurried
Saturday-night millinery.

A bonnet is a picture in its way, and grows up under one's fingers with
a pretty sense of artistic triumph. Besides, there is always the
question: Will it be becoming? So Sharley put her lamp on a cricket, and
herself on the floor, and began to sing over her work. A pretty sight it
was,--the low, dark room with the heavy shadows in its corners; all the
light and color drawn to a focus in the middle of it; Sharley, with her
head bent--bits of silk like broken rainbows tossed about her--and that
little musing smile, considering gravely, Should the white squares of
the plaid turn outward? and where should she put the coral? and would it
be becoming after all? A pretty, girlish sight, and you may laugh at it
if you choose; but there was a prettier woman's tenderness underlying
it, just as a strain of fine, coy sadness will wind through a mazourka
or a waltz. For who would see the poor little hat to-morrow at church?
and would he like it? and when he came to-morrow night,--for of course
he would come to-morrow night,--would he tell her so?

When everybody else was in bed and the house still, Sharley locked her
door, furtively stole to the bureau-glass, shyly tied on that hat, and
more shyly peeped in. A flutter of October colors and two great brown
eyes looked back at her encouragingly.

"I should like to be pretty," said Sharley, and asked the next minute to
be forgiven for the vanity. "At any rate," by way of modification, "I
should like to be pretty to-morrow."

She prayed for Halcombe Dike when she kneeled, with her face hidden in
her white bed, to say "Our Father." I believe she had prayed for him now
every night for a year. Not that there was any need of it, she reasoned,
for was he not a great deal better than she could ever be? Far above
her; oh, as far above her as the shining of the stars was above the
shining of the maple-tree; but perhaps if she prayed very hard they
would give one extra, beautiful angel charge over him. Then, was it not
quite right to pray for one's old friends? Besides--besides, they had a
pleasant sound, those two words: "_Our_ Father."

"I will be good to-morrow," said Sharley, dropping into sleep.
"Mother's head will ache, and I can go to church. I will listen to the
minister, and I won't plan out my winter dresses in prayer-time. I won't
be cross to Moppet, nor shake Methuselah. I will be good. Hal will help
me to be good. I shall see him in the morning,--in the morning."

Sharley's self-knowledge, like the rest of her, was in the bud yet.

Her Sun-day, her one warm, shining day, opened all in a glow. She danced
down stairs at ten o'clock in the new hat, in a haze of merry colors.
She had got breakfast and milked one cow and dressed four boys that
morning, and she felt as if she had earned the right to dance in a haze
of anything. The sunlight quivered in through the blinds. The leaves of
the yellow maple drifted by on the fresh, strong wind. The church-bells
rang out like gold. All the world was happy.

"Charlotte!" Her mother bustled out of the "keeping-room" with her hat
on. "I've changed my mind, Sharley, and feel so much better I believe I
will go to church. I'll take Methuselah, but Nate and Moppet had better
stay at home with the baby. The last time I took Moppet he fired three
hymn-books at old Mrs. Perkins,--right into the crown of her bonnet, and
in the long prayer, too. That child will be the death of me some day. I
guess you'll get along with him, and the baby isn't quite as cross as he
was yesterday. You'd just as lief go in the afternoon, I suppose? Pin
my shawl on the shoulder, please."

But Sharley, half-way down the stairs, stood still. She was no saint,
this disappointed little girl. Her face, in the new fall hat, flushed
angrily and her hands dropped.

"O mother! I did want to go! You're always keeping me at home for
something. I did _want_ to go!"--and rushed up stairs noisily, like a
child, and slammed her door.

"Dear me!" said her mother, putting on her spectacles to look after
her,--"dear me! what a temper! I'm sure I don't see what difference it
makes to her which half of the day she goes. Last Sunday she must go in
the afternoon, and wouldn't hear of anything else. Well, there's no
accounting for girls! Come, Methuselah."

_Is_ there not any "accounting for girls," my dear madam? What is the
matter with those mothers, that they cannot see? Just as if it never
made any difference to them which half of the day they went to church!
Well, well! we are doing it, all of us, as fast as we can,--going the
way of all the earth, digging little graves for our young sympathies,
one by one, covering them up close. It grows so long since golden
mornings and pretty new bonnets and the sweet consciousness of watching
eyes bounded life for us! We have dreamed our dreams; we have learned
the long lesson of our days; we are stepping on into the shadows. Our
eyes see that ye see not; our ears hear that which ye have not
considered. We read your melodious story through, but we have read other
stories since, and only its _haec fabula docet_ remains very fresh. You
will be as obtuse as we are some day, young things! It is not neglect;
it is not disapproval,--we simply forget. But from such forgetfulness
may the good Lord graciously deliver us, one and all!

There! I fancy that I have made for Mrs. Guest--sitting meantime in her
cushioned pew (directly behind Halcombe Dike), and comfortably looking
over the "Watts and Select" with Methuselah--a better defence than ever
she could have made for herself. Between you and me, girls,--though you
need not tell your mother,--I think it is better than she deserves.

Sharley, upstairs, had slammed her door and locked it, and was pacing
hotly back and forth across her room. Poor Sharley! Sun and moon and
stars were darkened; the clouds had returned after the rain. She tore
off the new hat and Sunday things savagely; put on her old
chocolate-colored morning-dress, with a grim satisfaction in making
herself as ugly as possible; pulled down the ribboned chignon which she
had braided, singing, half an hour ago (her own, that chignon); screwed
her hair under a net into the most unbecoming little pug of which it was
capable, and went drearily down stairs. Nate, enacting the cheerful
drama of "Jeff Davis on a sour apple-tree," hung from the balusters,
purple, gasping, tied to the verge of strangulation by the energetic
Moppet. The baby was calmly sitting in the squash-pies.

Halcombe Dike, coming home from church that morning a little in advance
of the crowd, saw a "Pre-raphaelite" in the doorway of Mr. Guest's barn,
and quietly unlatching the gate came nearer to examine it. It was worth
examining. There was a ground of great shadows and billowy hay; a pile
of crimson apples struck out by the light through a crack; two children
and a kitten asleep together in a sunbeam; a girl on the floor with a
baby crawling over her; a girl in a chocolate-colored dress with yellow
leaves in her hair,--her hair upon her shoulders, and her eyelashes wet.

"Well, Sharley!"

She looked up to see him standing there with his grave, amused smile.
Her first thought was to jump and run; her second, to stand fire.

"Well, Mr. Halcombe! Moppet's stuck yellow leaves all over me; my hair's
down; I've got on a horrid old morning-dress; look pretty to see
company, don't I?"

"Very, Sharley."

"Besides," said Sharley, "I've been crying, and my eyes are red."

"So I see."

"No, you don't, for I'm not looking at you."

"But I am looking at you."

"Oh!"

"What were you crying about, Sharley!"

"Because my grandmother's dead," said Sharley, after some reflection.

"Ah, yes, I remember! about '36, I think, her tombstone gives as the
date of that sad event?"

"I think it's wicked in people to laugh at people's dead grandmothers,"
said Sharley, severely. "You ought to be at church."

"So I was."

"I wasn't; mother wouldn't--" But her lip quivered, and she stopped. The
memory of the new hat and Sunday dress, of the golden church-bells, and
hush of happy Sabbath-morning thoughts came up. That he should see her
now, in this plight, with her swollen eyes and pouting lips, and her
heart full of wicked discontent!

"Wouldn't what, Sharley?"

"_Don't!_" she pleaded, with a sob; "I'm cross; I can't talk. Besides, I
shall cry again, and I _won't_ cry again. You may let me alone, or you
may go away. If you don't go away you may just tell me what you have
been doing with yourself this whole long summer. Working hard, of
course. I don't see but that everybody has to work hard in this world! I
hate this world! I suppose you're a rich man by this time?"

The young man looked at the chocolate dress, the yellow leaves, the
falling hair, and answered gravely,--a little coldly, Sharley
thought,--that his prospects were not encouraging just now. Perhaps they
never had been encouraging; only that he in his young ardor had thought
so. He was older now, and wiser. He understood what a hard pull was
before young architects in America,--any young architect, the best of
young architects,--and whether there was a place for him remained to be
proved. He was willing to work hard, and to hope long; but he grew a
little tired of it sometimes, and so--He checked himself suddenly. "As
if," thought Sharley, "he were tired of talking so long to me! He
thought my question impertinent." She hid her face in her drooping hair,
and wished herself a mile away.

"There was something you once told me about some sort of buildings?" she
ventured, timidly, in a pause.

"The Crumpet Buildings. Yes, I sent my proposals, but have not heard
from them yet; I don't know that I ever shall. That is a large affair,
rather. The name of the thing would be worth a good deal to me if I
succeeded. It would give me a start, and--"

"Ough!" exclaimed Sharley. She had been sitting at his feet, with her
face raised, and red eyes forgotten, when, splash! an icy stream of
water came into her eyes, into her mouth, down her neck, up her sleeves.
She gasped, and stood drenched.

"O, it's only a rain-storm," said Moppet, appearing on the scene with
his empty dipper. "I got tired of sleeping. I dreamed about three
giants. I didn't like it. I wanted something to do. It's only _my_
rain-storm, and you needn't mind it, you know."

Dripping Sharley's poor little temper, never of the strongest, quivered
to its foundations. She took hold of Moppet without any observation, and
shook him just about as hard as she could shake. When she came to her
senses her mother was coming in at the gate, and Halcombe Dike was gone.

"I s'pose I've got to 'tend to that hollering to-night," said Moppet,
with a gentle sigh.

This was at a quarter past seven. Nate and Methuselah were in bed. The
baby was asleep. Moppet had thrown his shoes into the water-pitcher but
twice, and run down stairs in his nightgown only four times that
evening; and Sharley felt encouraged. Perhaps, after all, he would be
still by half past seven; and by half past seven--If Halcombe Dike did
not come to-night, something was the matter. Sharley decided this with a
sharp little nod.

She had devoted herself to Moppet with politic punctiliousness. Would he
lie at his lazy length, with his feet on her clean petticoat, while she
bent and puzzled over his knotted shoestrings? Very well. Did he signify
a desire to pull her hair down and tickle her till she gasped? She was
at his service. Should he insist upon being lulled to slumber by the
recounted adventures of Old Mother Hubbard, Red Riding-Hood, and Tommy
Tucker? Not those exactly, it being thought proper to keep him in a
theologic mood of mind till after sundown, but he should have David and
Goliath and Moses in the bulrushes with pleasure; then Moses and Goliath
and David again; after that, David and Goliath and Moses, by way of
variety. She conducted every Scriptural dog and horse of her
acquaintance entirely round the globe in a series of somewhat apocryphal
adventures. She ransacked her memory for biblical boys, but these met
with small favor. "Pooh! _they_ weren't any good! They couldn't play
stick-knife and pitch-in. Besides, they all died. Besides, they weren't
any great shakes. Jack the Giant-Killer was worth a dozen of 'em, sir!
Now tell it all over again, or else I won't say my prayers till next
winter!"

After some delicate plotting, Sharley manoeuvred him through "Now I lay
me," and tucked him up, and undertook a little Sunday-night catechizing,
conscientiously enough.

"Has Moppet been a good boy to-day?"

"Well, that's a pretty question! Course I have!"

"But have you had any good thoughts, dear, you know?"

"O yes, lots of 'em! been thinking about Blessingham."

"Who? O, Absalom!"

"O yes, I've been thinking about Blessingham, you know; how he must have
looked dreadful funny hanging up there onto his hair, with all the darts
'n things stickin' into him! _Would_n't you like to seen him! No, you
needn't go off, 'cause I ain't begun to be asleep yet."

Time and twilight were creeping on together. Sharley was sure that she
had heard the gate shut, and that some one sat talking with her mother
upon the front doorsteps.

"O Moppet! _Could_n't you go to sleep without me this one night,--not
this one night?" and the hot, impatient tears came in the dark.

"O no," said immovable Moppet, "of course I can't; and I 'spect I'm
going to lie awake all night too. You'd ought to be glad to stay with
your little brothers. The girl in my library-book, she was glad,
anyhow."

Sharley threw herself back in the rocking-chair and let her eyes brim
over. She could hear the voices on the doorsteps plainly; her mother's
wiry tones and the visitor's; it was a man's voice, low and less
frequent. Why did not her mother call her? Had not he asked to see her?
Had he not? Would nobody ever come up to take her place? Would Moppet
never go to sleep? There he was peering at her over the top of the
sheet, with two great, mischievous, wide-awake eyes. And time and
twilight were wearing on.

Let us talk about "affliction" with our superior, reproving smile!
Graves may close and hearts may break, fortunes, hopes, and souls be
ruined, but Moppet wouldn't go to sleep; and Sharley in her
rocking-chair doubted her mother's love, the use of life, and the
benevolence of God.

"I'm lying awake to think about Buriah," observed Moppet, pleasantly.
"David wanted to marry Buriah's wife. She was a very nice woman."

Silence followed this announcement.

"Sharley? you needn't think I'm asleep,--any such thing. Besides, if you
go down you'd better believe I'll holler! See here: s'pose I'd slung my
dipper at Hal Dike, jest as David slung the stone at Go-li--"

Another silence. Encouraged, Sharley dried her tears and crept half-way
across the floor. Then a board creaked.

"O Sharley! Why don't people shut their eyes when they die? Why, Jim
Snow's dorg, he didn't. I punched a frog yesterday. I want a drink of
water."

Sharley resigned herself in despair to her fate. Moppet lay broad and
bright awake till half past eight. The voices by the door grew silent.
Steps sounded on the walk. The gate shut.

"That child has kept me up with him the whole evening long," said
Sharley, coming sullenly down. "You didn't even come and speak to him,
mother. I suppose Halcombe Dike never asked for me?"

"Halcombe Dike! Law! that wasn't Halcombe Dike. It was Deacon Snow,--the
old Deacon,--come in to talk over the revival. Halcombe Dike was at
meeting, your father says, with his cousin Sue. Great interest up his
way, the Deacon says. There's ten had convictions since Conference
night. I wish you were one of the interested, Sharley."

But Sharley had fled. Fled away into the windy, moonless night, down
through the garden, out into the sloping field. She ran back and forth
through the grass with great leaps, like a wounded thing. All her worry
and waiting and disappointment, and he had not come! All the thrill and
hope of her happy Sunday over and gone, and he had not come! All the
winter to live without one look at him,--and he knew it, and he would
not come!

"I don't care!" sobbed Sharley, like a defiant child, but threw up her
hands with the worlds and wailed. It frightened her to hear the sound of
her own voice--such a pitiful, shrill voice--in the lonely place. She
broke into her great leaps again, and so ran up and down the slope, and
felt the wind in her face. It drank her breath away from her after a
while; it was a keen, chilly wind. She sat down on a stone in the middle
of the field, and it came over her that it was a cold, dark place to be
in alone; and just then she heard her father calling her from the yard.
So she stood up very slowly and walked back.

"You'll catch your death!" fretted her mother, "running round bareheaded
in all this damp. You know how much trouble you are when you are sick,
too, and I think you ought to have more consideration for me, with all
my care. Going to bed? Be sure and not forget to put the baby's gingham
apron in the wash."

Sharley lighted her kerosene lamp without reply. It was the little
kerosene with the crack in the handle. Some vague notion that everything
in the world had cracked came to her as she crept upstairs. She put her