He often reported with pride that the old man talked as
sensible as anybody, "get him off where it's quiet." Indeed, when Mr.
Perkins died, six years later, we had forgotten that he was anything but
a little queer, and he had known many happy, lucid hours with his
grandchildren.

Susie and Bronson had two boys--sturdy, hearty children, in whom Lem took
the deepest, shyest pride. He loved to take them off into the woods with
him and exulted in their quick intelligence and strong little bodies.
Susie got into the way of letting him take a good deal of the care of
them.

It was Lem who first took alarm about the fall that little Frank had, down
the cellar stairs. He hurt his spine somehow--our local doctor could not
tell exactly how--and as the injury only made him limp a little, nobody
thought much about it, until he began to have difficulty in walking. Then
Lem sent for a doctor from Rutland who, as soon as he examined the child,
stuck out his lower lip and rubbed his chin ominously. He pronounced the
trouble something with a long name which none of us had ever heard, and
said that Frank would be a hopeless cripple if it, were not cured soon.
There was, he said, a celebrated doctor from Europe now traveling in this
country who had a wonderful new treatment for this condition. But under
the circumstances--he looked about the plain farm sitting-room--he
supposed that was out of the question.

"What did the doctor from foreign parts ask?" queried Bronson, and, being
informed of some of the customary prices for major operations, fell back
hopeless. Susie, her pretty, childish face drawn and blanched into a wan
beauty, put her arms about her sick little son and looked at her
stepfather. He had never failed her.

He did not fail her now. He sold the land he had accumulated field by
field; he sold the great flock of sheep, every one of which he could call
by name; he mortgaged the house over the protesting head of his now
bedridden mother; he sold the horse and cow, and the very sticks of
furniture from the room where Susie had grown up and where the crazy
grandfather of Susie's children had known a peaceful old age and death.
Little Frank was taken to New York to the hospital to have the great
surgeon operate on him--he is there yet, almost completely recovered and
nearly ready to come home.

Back in Hillsboro, Lem now began life all over again, hiring out humbly to
his neighbors and only stipulating that he should have e