ot keep standing. Young people nowadays
don't know what the custom is. And you must say something, Katharine;
you should talk to a mourner, not be dumb. Say something."

The sturdy, round-cheeked girl flushed crimson. "I can't," she
stammered out, bursting into a passion of tears, and covering her face
with her apron, as she became conscious that Lenz's eyes were fixed
upon her.

"Don't cry," he said, soothingly. "Thank God every day that you still
have your parents. There, I have tasted the soup."

"You must take something else," urged Franzl. He obeyed with an effort,
and then rose from the table. The girl rose too. "Forgive me, Lenz,"
she said. "I ought to have comforted you, but I--I--"

"I know; thank you, Katharine. I can't talk much yet myself."

"Good by. Father says you must come and see us; he has a lame foot, and
cannot come to you."

"I will see: I will come if I can."

When she was gone, Lenz walked up and down the room with outstretched
hands, as seeking to grasp some form, but he found no one. His eye fell
upon the tools, and was chiefly attracted by a file that hung on the
wall by itself. A sudden idea seized him as he raised his hand to take
it.

This file was his choicest heirloom. His father had used it constantly
for forty-seven years, till his thumb had worn a groove in its
maple-wood handle. "Who would believe," the old man was fond of saying,
"that many years' work of a man's hand would wear a wooden handle like
that?" The mother always exhibited this wonderful file to strangers as
a curiosity.

The doctor down in the valley had a collection of old clocks and tools,
and had often asked for this file to hang up in his cabinet; but the
father never would give it. Since his death, the mother and son
naturally set a great value on the heirloom. After the father's
funeral, when mother and son were sitting quietly together at home, she
said, "Now, Lenz, we have wept enough; we must bear our burden in
silence. Take your father's file, and work. 'Work and pray while yet it
is day,' runs the proverb. Be glad you have an honest trade, and do not
need to brood over what is past. A thousand times has your father said,
'What a help it is to get up in the morning and find your work waiting.
When I file, I file all the useless chips out of my brain; and when I
hammer, I knock all heavy thoughts on the head, and away they go.'

"Those were my mother's words then, and they ring in my ears to-day.
Woul