ing
corners; this main room and the lean-to kitchen constituting the whole
house.

Steve's watch never left his hand the long night through, and for the
first time in his uneventful life he slept fitfully, waking every
little while to make sure it was there.

Jim Langly was away for a few days "to a logrolling" several miles
away and did not return until dusk of the evening after Steve's watch
came. The boy sat again by the firelight, watch in hand, when Jim
walked in at the door. His eyes fell at once upon the strange, shining
thing and his face was convulsed with sudden wrath:

"Didn't I tell ye to have nothin' to do with city folks? Ye shan't
keep that thing. I'll smash it, so he'p me God!" But before he could
lift a hand a scream came from the bed, and Mrs. Langly sat up wild
and dishevelled.

"Let him hev it, Jim Langly, let him hev it," and then she dropped
back gray and still. Jim Langly had seen that gray stillness before,
and he stood looking upon it now in dumb terror. His wife had been
ailing a long time, it was true, yet no one had thought of death. But
the grim visitor was there in all his quiet majesty. The weary spirit,
which had for so many years longed for flight into new haunts of men,
had winged its way at last to a far, mysterious country of which she
had heard little, but towards which for months past she had been
reaching out with a strange prescience of which no one guessed.

It was a dreary night at the cabin. No one tried to sleep. Jim Langly
said no more to Steve about the watch, and the boy wore it in his
bosom attached to a stout string about his neck, keeping it out of
sight, and sobbing in the stillness of the woods as he wandered with
Tige, "Mammy wanted me to have it." And though his joy in it for the
time was gone, there was peculiar comfort in this thought of her
approval. The old dog looked up in the boy's face from time to time
pitifully, or stuck his nose in the lad's hand, knowing well, in a way
dogs have, what had happened.

Next day the wife and mother was laid to rest beside the row of little
graves, and life completely changed for Steve. He went to bed as usual
in his corner of the room, but he could not forget the still form
which had lain in another corner the night before, and while Mirandy
and his father slept heavily, he slipped from the bed, took a blanket
and with Tige at his heels went into the woods again. Here in the
stillness which he loved, worn out with loss