a good old clock in the corner "ticking" life,
and youth, and hope away. There was the buttery off that, with its
meagre china and crockery, its window looking out on the field of rye,
the little orchard of winter apples, and the hedge of cranberry bushes.
Upstairs were rooms with no ceilings, where, lying on a corn-husk bed,
you reached up and touched the sloping roof, with windows at the end
only, facing the buckwheat field, and looking down two miles towards
the main road--for the farm was on a concession or side-road, dusty in
summer, and in winter sometimes impassable for weeks together. It was
not much of a home, as any one with the mind's eye can see, but four
stalwart men and three fine women had been born, raised, and quartered
there, until, with good clothes, and speaking decent English and
tolerable French, and with money in their pockets, hardly got by the old
people, one by one they issued forth into the world.

The old mother showed Rodney's wife what there was for eyes to see,
not forgetting the three hives of bees on the south side, beneath the
parlour window. She showed it with a kind of pride, for it all seemed
good to her, and every dish, and every chair, and every corner in the
little house had to her a glory of its own, because of those who had
come and gone--the firstlings of her flock, the roses of her little
garden of love, blooming now in a rougher air than ranged over the
little house on the hill. She had looked out upon the pine woods to
the east and the meadow-land to the north, the sweet valley between the
rye-field and the orchard, and the good honest air that had blown there
for forty years, bracing her heart and body for the battle of love and
life, and she had said through all, Behold it is very good.

But the pert milliner saw nothing of all this; she did not stand abashed
in the sacred precincts of a home where seven times the Angel of Death
had hovered over a birth-bed. She looked into the face which Time's
finger had anointed, and motherhood had etched with trouble, and said:

"'Tisn't much, is it? Only a clap-board house, and no ceilings upstairs,
and rag carpets-pshaw!"

And when she came to wash her hands for dinner, she threw aside the
unscented, common bar-soap, and, shrugging her narrow shoulders at the
coarse towel, wiped her fingers on her cambric handkerchief. Any other
kind of a woman, when she saw the old mother going about with her
twisted wrist--a doctor's bad work wi