im.

"Barney ain't no more notion of comin' back than he had before, in
spite of all the talk. I never see such work," replied Sarah, in a
voice strained high with tears.

"I call it pretty doin's," assented Cephas. His pale face, with its
venerable beard, was closely set about with his white nightcap. He
lay staring straight before him with a solemnly reflective air.

"I wish you hadn't brought up 'lection that time, father," ventured
Sarah, with a piteous sniff.

"If the Democratic party had only lived different, an' hadn't eat so
much meat, there wouldn't have been any trouble," returned Cephas,
magisterially. "If you go far enough, you'll always get back to that.
A man is what he puts into his mouth. Meat victuals is at the bottom
of democracy. If there wa'n't any meat eat there wouldn't be any
Democratic party, an' there wouldn't be any wranglin' in the state.
There'd be one party, jest as there'd ought to be."

"I wish you hadn't brought it up, father," Sarah lamented again;
"it's most killin' me."

"If we hadn't both of us been eatin' so much animal food there
wouldn't have been any trouble," repeated Cephas.

"Well, I dunno much about animal food, but I know I'm about
discouraged," said Sarah. And she went back to the kitchen, and sat
down in the rocking-chair and cried a long time, with her apron over
her face. Her heartache was nearly as sore as her daughter's
up-stairs.

Charlotte did not speak to Barney again all summer--indeed, she
scarcely ever saw him. She had an occasional half-averted glimpse of
his figure across the fields, and that was all. Barney had gone back
to the old house to live with his father, and remained there through
the summer and fall; but Caleb died in November. He had never been
the same since Deborah's death; whether, like an old tree whose roots
are no longer so firm in the earth that they can withstand every wind
of affliction, the shock itself had shaken him to his fall, or the
lack of that strange wontedness which takes the place of early love
and passion had enfeebled him, no one could tell. He had seemed to
simply stare at life from a sunny place on a stone-wall or a
door-step all summer.

When the autumn set in he sat in his old chair by the fire. Caleb had
always felt cold since Deborah died. When the bell tolled off his
years, one morning in November, nobody felt surprised. People had
said to each other for some time that Caleb Thayer was failing.

Barney, after