fast by his shaking hand, for they loved each other, these two. The
cruel stroke of the sun that had blurred the old man's brain had spared
a blessed something in him that won the healing love of children.

"How d' ye, Mote?" he piped in his feeble voice. "They say Lucindy's
dead. ... Jot says she is, 'n' Diademy says she is, 'n' I guess she is.
... It 's a dretful thick year for fol'age; ... some o' the maples looks
like balls in the air."

Mote looked in at the window. The neighbors were hurrying to and fro.
Diadema sat with her calico apron up to her face, sobbing; and for the
first morning in thirty years, old Mrs. Bascom's high-backed rocker was
empty, and there was no one sitting in the village watch-tower.

TOM O' THE BLUEB'RY PLAINS.

The sky is a shadowless blue; the noon-day sun glows fiercely; a cloud
of dust rises from the burning road whenever the hot breeze stirs the
air, or whenever a farm wagon creaks along, its wheels sinking into the
deep sand.

In the distance, where the green of the earth joins the blue of the sky,
gleams the silver line of a river.

As far as the eye an reach, the ground is covered with blueberry bushes;
red leaves peeping among green ones; bloom of blue fruit hanging in full
warm clusters,--spheres of velvet mellowed by summer sun, moistened with
crystal dew, spiced with fragrance of woods.

In among the blueberry bushes grow huckleberries, "choky pears," and
black-snaps.

Gnarled oaks and stunted pines lift themselves out of the wilderness of
shrubs. They look dwarfed and gloomy, as if Nature had been an untender
mother, and denied them proper nourishment.

The road is a little-traveled one, and furrows of feathery grasses grow
between the long, hot, sandy stretches of the wheel-ruts.

The first goldenrod gleams among the loose stones at the foot of the
alder bushes. Whole families of pale butterflies, just out of their
long sleep, perch on the brilliant stalks and tilter up and down in the
sunshine.

Straggling processions of wooly brown caterpillars wend their way in
the short grass by the wayside, where the wild carrot and the purple
bull-thistle are coming into bloom.

The song of birds is seldom heard, and the blueberry plains are given
over to silence save for the buzzing of gorged flies, the humming of
bees, and the chirping of crickets that stir the drowsy air when the
summer begins to wane.

It is so still that the shuffle-shuffle of a footstep ca