as if
knowing it marked eternal hours. The flames waved softly upward without
their former crackle and sheen; and the moving shadows were gentle and
rhythmic ones come to keep the soul company. Amelia felt her thread
lovingly.

"I guess I'll dye it blue," she said, with a tenderness great enough to
compass inanimate things. "He always set by blue, didn't he, puss?"

THE FLAT-IRON LOT

The fields were turning brown, and in the dusty gray of the roadside,
closed gentians gloomed, and the aster burned like a purple star. It was
the finest autumn for many years. People said, with every clear day,
"Now this must be a weather-breeder;" but still the storm delayed. Then
they anxiously scanned the heavens, as if, weeks beforehand, the signs
of the time might be written there; for this was the fall of all others
when wind and sky should be kind to Tiverton. She was going to celebrate
her two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, and she was big with the
importance of it.

On a still afternoon, over three weeks before that happy day, a slender
old man walked erectly along the country road. He carried a cane over
his shoulder, and, slung upon it, a small black leather bag, bearing the
words, painted in careful letters, "Clocks repaired by N. Oldfield." As
he went on, he cast a glance, now and then, to either side, from
challenging blue eyes, strong yet in the indomitable quality of youth.
He knew every varying step of the road, and could have numbered, from
memory, the trees and bushes that fringed its length; and now, after a
week's absence, he swept the landscape with the air of a manorial lord,
to see what changes might have slipped in unawares. At one point, a flat
triangular stone had been tilted up on edge, and an unpracticed hand had
scrawled on it, in chalk, "4 M to Sudleigh." The old man stopped, took
the bag from his shoulder, and laid it tenderly on a stone of the wall.
Then, with straining hands, he pulled the rock down into the worn spot
where it had lain, and gave a sigh of relief when it settled into its
accustomed place, and the tall grass received it tremulously. Now he
opened his bag, took from it a cloth, carefully folded, and rubbed the
rock until those defiling chalk marks were partially effaced.

"Little varmints!" he said, apostrophizing the absent school children
who had wrought the deed. "Can't they let nothin' alone?" He took up his
bag, and went on.

Nicholas Oldfield, as he walked the road t