ratitude in his eyes, followed his guide and
friend. They went through the store-room between great piles of
blankets, through the wool-room filled with big bales of fleece, and
up-stairs into the weaving-room amid the click and clatter and roar of
three score busy and intricate looms. Pen was introduced to the
foreman, and his duties as bobbin-boy were explained to him.

"It's easy enough," said the foreman, "if you only pay attention to
your work. You simply have to take the bobbins in these little
running-boxes to the looms as the weavers call for them and give you
their numbers. Perhaps you had better stay here this afternoon and let
Dan Larew show you how. I'll give him a loom to-morrow morning, and
you can take his place."

So Pen stayed. And when the mills were shut down for the day, when the
big wheels stopped, and the cylinders were still, and the clatter of
a thousand working metal fingers ceased, and the voices of the mill
girls were no longer drowned by the rattle and roar of moving
machinery, he went with Dan to his home, a half mile away, where he
found a good boarding-place.

At seven o'clock the next morning he was at the mill, and, at the end
of his first day's real work for real wages, he went to his new home,
tired indeed, but happier than he had ever been before in all his
life.

So the days went by; and spring blossomed into summer, and summer
melted into autumn, and winter came again and dropped her covering of
snow upon the landscape, whiter and softer than any fleece that was
ever scoured or picked or carded at the Starbird mills. And then Pen
had a great joy. His mother came to Lowbridge to live with him. Death
had kindly released Grandma Walker from her long suffering, and there
was no longer any need for his mother to stay on the little farm at
Cobb's Corners. She was an expert seamstress and she found more work
in the town than she could do. And the very day on which she
came--Major Starbird knew that she was coming--Pen was promoted to a
loom. One thing only remained to cloud his happiness. He was still
estranged from the dear, tenderhearted, but stubborn old patriot at
Chestnut Hill.

With only his daughter to comfort him, the old man lived his lonely
life, grieving silently, ever more and more, at the fate which
separated him from this brave scion of his race, aging as only the
sorrowing can age, yet, with a stubborn pride, and an unyielding
purpose, refusing to make the first advan