trap of decrepitude. He would find him with his boots on, up and
about--or, if in bed, not there except as in the regular rest intervals
of his diurnal round.

And the fact that he, a polyp in the great atoll of life, had found his
exact place and due work was the reason that, at one hundred years, life
was yet an orange upon the palate of Old Dalton.

Nanny Craig--who later became Mother Dalton--had, in remote eighteen
hundred and twenty, been a squalling, crabbed baby, and had apparently
started life determined to be crotchety. If she had adhered to this
schedule she would have been buried before she was sixty and would have
been glad to go. But Old Dalton--then young Dave Dalton--married her out
of hand at seventeen, and so remade and conserved her in the equable,
serene, and work-filled atmosphere of the home he founded that Nanny far
outdid all her family age records, recent or ancestral, and lived to
ninety-three. She was seven years younger than Dave, and now three
months dead.

Dave had missed her sorely. People had said the Message would not be
long coming to him after she went. Perhaps if he had been in the usual
case of those who have passed the seventh decade--weary and halt and
without employment or the ability or wish for it--he would have brooded
and worried himself into the grave very soon after the passing of his
old "mate" and one living contemporary. But he was a born, inured, and
inveterate worker, and as long as there were "chores" for him to do he
felt ample excuse for continuing to exist. Old Dalton still had the
obsession, too, that while and where he lived he was "boss" and manager;
and one solid, sustaining thought that helped to keep him living was
that if he died the Dalton farm (it was the original old homestead that
these young descendants of his occupied) would be without its essential
head and squire.

So sturdy, so busy, and so well had he been always that all the deaths
he had seen in his journey down a hundred years of mortality had failed
to bring home to him the grave and puissant image of death as a personal
visitant.

"Ey, I'm always out wur-rkin' when they send fur me, I guess," was the
joke he had made at eighty and repeated so often since that now he said
it quite naively and seriously, as a fact and a credible explanation.

But, although it took time to show its effect, Nanny's going hit him a
little harder than any of the other deaths he had witnessed. She had
traveled