n for you at the
first glance. Most of us have cause to thank God that He
has not written on our faces; but Emmanuel could have
carried no writing large enough for his mother to read.
Because he was weak and idle, two of her nephews lived on
the farm, Barend and Peter van Trump, great slow true men,
with hearts like children; yet she esteemed Emmanuel as
much above them as they in truth, in all points of worth
and virtue, were over him. Ah, but a mother is a traitor to
the whole world.

"I remember this Emmanuel well. A bony small man of the
color of straw, with eyes that moved too quickly and a cold
hand, a body like a wisp of linen-cloth-so flimsy and
slight--and some slenderness at the knee that made him
shamble like a thief! Peter stood with a great brown hand
on his shoulder, smiling at me with a frank open mouth and
cheeks creased with pleasantry. When he laughed, his body
shook mightily, and the motion of his hand made the other
stagger. And the Vrouw van der Westhuizen stood there
looking, with eyes like pools of pride for her son.

"There was nothing in the farm to hold Emmanuel, no charm
in the veld nor interest in the work. He was barely a man
when he would ride on to the dorp and its saloons, and in
time he was there oftener and oftener, drinking and soiling
his hands with all the strange foulness of life the English
bring with them. We, the neighbors round about, marked it
of course; but none thought much of Emmanuel and his
doings; and the thing was little talked of till it became
known that at last he was gone for good, and had betaken
himself to live in a great town, among devilries that have
no name in our clean Taal.

"It was a grievous blow for the Vrouw van der Westhuizen.
From the time he departed, she became old; as she went
about her affairs, the woe at her heart was plain to see.
She was a stricken woman, the world had been cut from under
her; and about her, now that her child was gone, she felt
nothing familiar, but lived, dumb and bewildered, in a maze
of strangers. Barend and Peter had no wits to console her.
How, indeed, should they have hoped to console a mother
thus bereft? The days lounged by inexorably, bringing no
word of Emmanuel with them, and no mercy. Their footprints
were the wounds upon the Vrouw van der Westhuizen's heart;
and, in the end she sickened wearily and lay listless, due
to death.

"Then only did the silence break and let through a word of
news. Some one--I c