there has ever been in the world for me!"

The old woman stopped her gasping by a superhuman effort. "Why, Natty, I
never supposed you thought so much of me still. I thought that had gone
when we got old. But, oh, my dear! I'm afraid I've dragged you down with
me to destruction. It wa'n't any matter about me, but I'm afraid you've
lost your soul. That was a wicked thing for us to do!"

Her husband lifted his tear-stained, old face and laid it on the pillow
beside her. He did not put his arms about her, as a younger lover or one
of another country might have done, but because he was a man who had loved
deeply all his life, his answer came with the solemn significance and
sincerity of a speech before the Judgment Seat. "I ain't afraid of hell if
you're there, Matey," he said.

His wife turned her head and looked at him, her whole face transfigured.
She was no longer a fat old woman on her deathbed. Before his very eyes
she grew again to be the girl among the currant bushes, and with the same
amazed intonation of incredulous joy she cried his name aloud. "Oh,
Nathaniel!" she said, and with the word the longed for _Finis_ was written
to her life.

A VILLAGE MUNCHAUSEN

I

When I was a little girl, and lived in Hillsboro with my grandparents,
there were two Decoration Days in every year. One was when all we
school-children took flowers put to the cemetery and decorated the graves
of the soldiers; and the other was when the peonies and syringas bloomed,
and grandfather and I went alone to put a bouquet on the grave of old
Jedediah Chillingworth.

Grandfather did this as a sort of penance for a great mistake he had made,
and I think it was with the idea of making an atonement by confession that
he used always to tell me the story of his relations with the old man. At
any rate, he started his narrative when we left the house and began to
walk out to the cemetery, and ended it as he laid the flowers on the
neglected grave. I trotted along beside him, faster and faster as he grew
more and more interested, and then stood breathless on the other side of
the grave as he finished, in his cracked old voice, harsh with emotion.

The first part of his story happened a very long time ago, even before
grandfather was born, when Jedediah Chillingworth first began to win for
himself the combination title of town-fool and town-liar. By the time
grandfather was a half-grown boy, big enough to join in the rough crowd of
vil