w minutes after four o'clock, in winter issuing with
lantern from the kitchen door to the stable and barn to feed the stock;
in summer sniffing the grey dawn and looking out on his fields of rye
and barley, before he went to gather the cows for milking and take the
horses to water.

For forty years he and his worn-faced wife bowed themselves beneath the
yoke, first to pay for the hundred-acre farm, and then to bring up
and educate their seven children. Something noble in them gave them
ambitions for their boys and girls which they had never had for
themselves; but when had gone the forty years, in which the little farm
had twice been mortgaged to put the eldest son through college as a
doctor, they faced the bitter fact that the farm had passed from them to
Rodney, the second son, who had come at last to keep a hotel in a
town fifty miles away. Generous-hearted people would think that these
grown-up sons and daughters should have returned the old people's long
toil and care by buying up the farm and handing it back to them, their
rightful refuge in the decline of life. But it was not so. They were
tenants where they had been owners, dependants where they had been
givers, slaves where once they were, masters. The old mother toiled
without a servant, the old man without a helper, save in harvest time.

But the great blow came when Rodney married the designing milliner who
flaunted her wares opposite his bar-room; and, somehow, from the date of
that marriage, Rodney's good fortune and the hotel declined. When he
and his wife first visited the little farm after their marriage the
old mother shrank away from the young woman's painted face, and ever
afterwards an added sadness showed in her bearing and in her patient
smile. But she took Rodney's wife through the house, showing her all
there was to show, though that was not much. There was the little
parlour with its hair-cloth chairs, rag carpet, centre table, and iron
stove with black pipes, all gaily varnished. There was the parlour
bedroom off it, with the one feather-bed of the house bountifully piled
up with coarse home-made blankets, topped by a silk patchwork quilt, the
artistic labour of the old wife's evening hours while Uncle Jim peeled
apples and strung them to dry from the rafters. There was a room,
dining-room in summer, and kitchen dining-room in winter, as clean as
aged hands could scrub and dust it, hung about with stray pictures from
illustrated papers, and