ally. "You may boss the job, though. I'll bring the potatoes to
the back door." And this he did, thinking it no trouble to hitch up the
team to draw the wagon into the back yard so that his mother might have
a part in the cutting of the seed potatoes, as she had had every year of
her life on the farm.

Very carefully, and in spite of her protests that she could walk quite
well, Thomas carried his mother out to her chair in the shade of the
house, arranging with tender solicitude the pillows at her back and the
rug at her feet. Then they set to work at the potatoes.

"Mind you have two eyes in every seed, Hughie," said Jessac, severely.

"Huh! I know. I've cut them often enough," replied Hughie, scornfully.

"Well, look at that one, now," said Jessac, picking up a seed that
Hughie had let fall; "that's only got one eye."

"There's two," said Hughie, triumphantly.

"That's not an eye," said Jessac, pointing to a mark on the potato;
"that's where the top grew out of, isn't it, mother?"

"It is, isn't it?" appealed Hughie.

Mrs. Finch took the seed and looked at it.

"Well, there's one very good eye, and that will do."

"But isn't that the mark of the top, mother?" insisted Jessac. But the
mother only shook her head at her.

"That's right, Jessac," said Thomas, driving off with his team; "you
look after Hughie, and mother will look after you both till I get back,
and there'll be a grand crop this year."

It was a happy hour for them all. The slanting rays of the afternoon
sun filled the air with a genial warmth. A little breeze bore from the
orchard near by a fragrance of apple-blossoms. A matronly hen, tethered
by the leg to her coop, raised indignant protest against the outrage on
her personal liberty, or clucked and crooned her invitations, counsels,
warnings, and encouragements, in as many different tones, to her
independent, fluffy brood of chicks, while a huge gobbler strutted
up and down, thrilling with pride in the glossy magnificence of his
outspread tail and pompous, mighty chest.

Hughie was conscious of a deep and grateful content, but across his
content lay a shadow. If only that would lift! As he watched Thomas with
his mother, he realized how far he had drifted from his own mother, and
he thought with regret of the happy days, which now seemed so far in
the past, when his mother had shared his every secret. But for him those
days could never come again.

At supper, Hughie was aware of some sub