the proud head almost touched the grass.

The rainbow was reflected in the million drops glittering upon the bowed
branches, turning each into a tear of liquid opal. The birds hopped on
the prone magnificence, and eyed timorously a strange object underneath.

There had been one swift, pitiless, merciful stroke! The monarch of the
meadow would never again feel the magic thrill of the sap in its veins,
nor the bursting of brown bud into green leaf.

The birds would build their nests and sing their idyls in other boughs.
The "time of pleasure and love" was over with the nooning tree; over
too, with him who slept beneath; for under its fallen branches, with the
light of a great peace in his upturned face, lay the man from Tennessee.

THE FORE-ROOM RUG.

Diadema, wife of Jot Bascom, was sitting at the window of the village
watch-tower, so called because it commanded a view of nearly everything
that happened in Pleasant River; those details escaping the physical
eye being supplied by faith and imagination working in the light of
past experience. She sat in the chair of honor, the chair of choice,
the high-backed rocker by the southern window, in which her husband's
mother, old Mrs. Bascom, had sat for thirty years, applying a still
more powerful intellectual telescope to the doings of her neighbors.
Diadema's seat had formerly been on the less desirable side of the
little light-stand, where Priscilla Hollis was now installed.

Mrs. Bascom was at work on a new fore-room rug, the former one having
been transferred to Miss Hollis's chamber; for, as the teacher at the
brick schoolhouse, a graduate of a Massachusetts normal school, and
the daughter of a deceased judge, she was a boarder of considerable
consequence. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon, and the two women were
alone. It was a pleasant, peaceful sitting-room, as neat as wax in every
part. The floor was covered by a cheerful patriotic rag carpet woven
entirely of red, white, and blue rags, and protected in various exposed
localities by button rugs,--red, white, and blue disks superimposed one
on the other.

Diadema Bascom was a person of some sentiment. When her old father,
Captain Dennett, was dying, he drew a wallet from under his pillow, and
handed her a twenty-dollar bill to get something to remember him by.
This unwonted occurrence burned itself into the daughter's imagination,
and when she came as a bride to the Bascom house she refurnished the
sitti