on, studying the illumined face, "he's
slightly touched in his upper story on the faith stunt; but he's in dead
earnest, and he's got the brotherhood-of-man bug bad. Come to think of
it, Hiram did say something about his 'sight failing,' but I didn't
think it was anything like this. If he's going to go finally blind in,
say, a week, perhaps it would be just as well to postpone the opening
night until he does."

Madison took the slate.

"Stranger things than that have happened," he wrote. "I never heard of
you before, yet I am one of the thousands beyond this little town and I
am here--why not the others?"

The Patriarch shook his head sadly.

"It is but a dream," he wrote.

Madison held the slate in his hands for quite a long time before he
wrote again; his attitude one of sympathetic hesitancy as his eyes
played over the form and face before him, while the Patriarch smiled at
him with gentle, patient resignation. Back in Madison's fertile brain
the germ of an inspiration was developing into fuller life.

"What will you do here alone when you are blind?" he asked--and his face
was disturbed and solicitous as he passed the Patriarch the slate.

"I need very little," the Patriarch wrote back. "You must not worry
about me. My garden supplies nearly all my wants, and there are many in
the village, I am sure, who will help me with that when the snow is
gone."

"I am quite certain of that," Madison's pencil agreed. "But here in the
house you cannot be alone--there are so many things to do, little things
that I am sure you have not thought of--some one must cook for you, for
instance. You will need a woman's hand here--have you no one, no
relative that you can call upon?"

The Patriarch lowered the slate from his eyes, shook his head a little
pathetically, and began to write.

"I do not think they would have cared to come, even if they were still
alive; but they are all gone many years ago--except perhaps a
grand-niece, and I do not know what has become of her."

"Why, that's just the thing," wrote Madison. "Suppose we try to find
her?"

Again the Patriarch shook his head.

"I am afraid that would be impossible. I do not even know that she is
alive. I know only of her birth, and that is twenty years ago."

"Even that is not hopeless," wrote Madison optimistically, and his face
as he looked at the Patriarch was seriously thoughtful. "Where was she
born?"

"New York," the Patriarch answered.

"And I never h