.
You've always noticed birds and studied 'em in the woods, and you can go
on doing it in a museum. But there ain't a thing for me! All I've ever
done is to live right here in this house ever since I was born, and look
out at the mountains and the big meadows and the river and the churchyard,
and keep house and take care of you and the children.

"Now the children are all gone, and I haven't the strength to take care of
you the way you need; my life is all done--there ain't no more to it!

"It's like a book--there's still a chapter _you_ can write, or one you can
finish up; but me--I've come right down to _Finis_, only the Lord won't
write it for me. It's as if somebody wanted to scrawl on the back flyleaf
something that hasn't a thing to do with the rest of the book, some
scratching stuff in a furrin' language that I can't even understand."

Her husband did not contradict her. He sighed heavily and they both fell
again into a cheerless silence. The moon rose with a strange, eerie
swiftness over the wall of mountain before them, and its wavering
reflection sprang at once to life in the swirling waters of the black hole
in the Necronsett on the other side of the meadow. The old woman's heart
gave a painful leap in her breast at the sight. It was probably one of the
last times she would see it. Numberless occasions when she had noted it
before hurried through her mind.

She felt herself again the little girl who had sat in summer evenings,
miles away from the talk of her elders in a happy child's reverie, and who
had grown dizzy with watching the swimming reflection in the whirlpool.
She had a strange fleeting hallucination that she was again sitting in the
moonlight, her cheeks flushed and her strong young pulse beating high to
hear Nathaniel's footfall draw nearer down the road. She felt again the
warm, soft weight of her little son, the first-born, the one who had died
young, as she remembered how proud she and Nathaniel had been when he
first noticed the moon.

An odd passion of recollection possessed her. As the moon rose higher she
seemed to be living over at one time a thousand hours of her busy, ardent
life. She looked at the high, drooping line of the mountains with her
childhood's delight in its clear outline against the sky; she saw the
white stones of the old graveyard, next door, glimmer through the shadow
cast by the church tower, with the half uneasy, fearful pleasure of her
romantic girlhood; she felt