s. When he sat down there was a heaving sigh of applause.

All through the discourse, the hymns, and the concluding prayer,
Lucina sobbed softly at intervals, her face hidden in her cambric
handkerchief. Somehow it went to her tender soul that the poor
Colonel should be lying there with no wife or child to mourn him;
then she had loved him, as she had loved everybody and everything
that had come kindly into her life. Every time she thought of the
corals and the beautiful ear-rings which the Colonel had given her
she wept afresh. Moreover, the motive for tears is always complex;
hers may have been intensified somewhat by her anxiety about her
lover and his misfortune. Now and then her mother touched her arm
remonstratingly. "Hush; you'll make yourself sick, child," she
whispered, softly; but poor Lucina was helpless before her grief.

The Squire, John Jennings, and Lawyer Means all sat by the dead body
of their friend, with pale and sternly downcast faces. Jerome looked
scarcely less sad. He remembered as he sat there every kind word
which the Colonel had ever spoken to him, and every one seemed
magnified a thousand-fold. This call to lend his living strength
towards the bearing of the dead man to his last home seemed like a
call to a labor of love and gratitude, though he was still much
perplexed that he should have been selected.

"There's Doctor Prescott and Cyrus Robinson and Uncle Ozias--any one
of them nearer his own age," he thought. It was not until the next
day but one that the mystery was solved. That night Lawyer Eliphalet
Means came to see Jerome, and informed him that the Colonel had left
a will, whereby he was entitled to a legacy of twenty-five thousand
dollars.

Chapter XXXVII

Colonel Lamson's will divided sixty-five thousand dollars among five
legatees--ten thousand was given to John Jennings, five thousand to
Eliphalet Means, five thousand to Eben Merritt, twenty thousand to
Lucina Merritt, and twenty-five thousand to Jerome Edwards.

Upham was not astonished by the first four bequests; the last almost
struck it dumb. "What in creation did he leave twenty-five thousand
dollars to that feller for? He wa'n't nothin' to him," Simon Basset
stammered, when he first heard the news on Tuesday night in
Robinson's store. His face was pale and gaping, and folk stared at
him.

Suddenly a man cried out, "By gosh, J'rome promised to give the hull
on't away! Don't ye remember?"

"That's so," cried