he said to himself one night as he came down
the long Souris hill, "a very good girl. She puts a conscientious
darn on the heel of a sock, quiet, unobtrusive, like herself. Martha
should marry. Twenty years from now if Martha's not married she will
be lonesome ... and gray and sad. I can see her, bent a little--good
still, and patient, but when all alone ... quite sad. It is well to
live alone and be free when one is young ... the world is wide ...
but the time comes when one would like ...company--all one's own
...some one who ... cares."

The old man suddenly came to himself and looked around suspiciously
at the bare oaks and willows that fringed the road. Not even to them
would he impart the secret of his heart. But some vision of the past
seemed to trouble him for he walked more slowly and seemed to be
quite insensible of the beauty of the scene around him.

The setting, sun threw long shafts of crimson light across the
snowbound valley and lit the windows of the distant farmhouse into
flame. A white rabbit flashed across the road and disappeared in the
brown scrub. The wind, which had blown all day, had ceased as evening
approached, and now not a branch stirred in the quiet valley, over
which the purple shades of the winter evening were creeping.

"It's a good world," he said at last, as if trying to convince
himself--"it is full of beauty and music. I think there must be
another world . . . over beyond the edge of things . . . a world that
is perhaps a little kinder and more just--it must be. I think it will
be--"

A flock of prairie chickens rose out of the snow almost at his feet
and flew rapidly across the river and up over the other hill. His eye
followed their flight--he loved those brave birds, who stay with us
through the longest winter and whose stout hearts no storm can daunt.

Then softly he began to sing, a brave song of love and pain and
enduring, a song that helped him to believe that:

"Good will fall,
At last, far off, at last--to all,
And every winter change to spring."

His voice wavered and trembled at first, as if it, too, felt the
weariness of the years, but by the time he had sung the first verse
all trace of sadness had vanished, and he went up the other, bank
walking briskly and singing almost gaily.

Thomas Perkins, doing his evening chores, stopped to listen at the
stable door as the old doctor came across the white field, then he
shook his head and said. "By George, it's