all make what
exertions they might, just as they were hoping for a sum that should
exceed the interest and begin the work of settling the principal would
come some loss that would throw them all back. One year their barn was
burned just as they had housed their hay. On another a valuable horse
died, and then there were fits of sickness among the children, and poor
crops in the field, and low prices in the market; in short, as Biah
remarked, "The deacon's luck did seem to be a sort o' streaky, for do
what you might there's always suthin' to put him back." As the younger
boys grew up the deacon had ceased to hire help, and Biah had transferred
his services to Squire Jones, a rich landholder in the neighborhood, who
wanted some one to overlook his place. The increased wages had enabled
him to give a home to Maria Jane and a start in life to two or three
sturdy little American citizens who played around his house door.
Nevertheless, Biah never lost sight of the "deacon's folks" in his
multifarious cares, and never missed an opportunity either of doing them
a good turn or of picking up any stray item of domestic news as to how
matters were going on in that interior. He had privately broached the
theory to Miss Briskett, "that arter all it was James that Diany (he
always pronounced all names as if they ended in y) was sot on, and that
she took it so hard, his goin' off, that it did beat all! Seemed to make
another gal of her; he shouldn't wonder if she'd come out and jine the
church." And Diana not long after unconsciously fulfilled Biah's
predictions.

Of late Biah's good offices had been in special requisition, as the
deacon had been for nearly a month on a sick bed with one of those
interminable attacks of typhus fever which used to prevail in old times,
when the doctor did everything he could to make it certain that a man
once brought down with sickness never should rise again.

But Silas Pitkin had a constitution derived through an indefinite
distance from a temperate, hard-working, godly ancestry, and so withstood
both death and the doctor, and was alive and in a convalescent state,
which gave hope of his being able to carve the turkey at his Thanksgiving
dinner.

The evening sunlight was just fading out of the little "keeping-room,"
adjoining the bed-room, where the convalescent now was able to sit up
most of the day. A cot bed had been placed there, designed for him to lie
down upon in intervals of fatigue. At pre