ght!" she cried to me with a bitter
fierceness: "Everything is wrong! Everything is wrong! If I can do
anything, I'd ought to do it to help them as want to smash everything up
and start over! What good does it do for me to bring up here just these
three out of all I saw ..." Her voice broke into pitiful, self-excusing
quavers, "but when I saw them ...the baby was so sick ... and little
Sigurd is so cunning ... he took to me right away, came to me the first
thing ... this morning he wouldn't pick up his new rubbers off the floor
for his mother, but, when I asked him, he did, right off ... you ought to
have seen what he had on ... such rags ... such dirt ... and 'twan't her
fault either! She's ... why she's like anybody ... like a person's cousin
they never happened to see before ...why, they were all _folks_!" she
cried out, her tired old mind wandering fitfully from one thing to
another.

"You didn't find the little boy in the asylum?" I asked.

"He was dead before I got there," she answered.

"Oh ... !" I said again, shocked, and then tentatively, "Had he ...?"

"I don't know whether he had or not," said Cousin Tryphena, "I didn't ask.
I didn't want to know. I know too much now!" She looked up fixedly at the
mountain line, high and keen against the winter sky. "Jombatiste is
right," she said again unsparingly, "I hadn't ought to be enjoying
them ... their father ought to be alive and with them. He was willing to
work all he could, and yet he ... here I've lived for fifty-five years and
never airned my salt a single day. What was I livin' on? The stuff these
folks ought to ha' had to eat ... them and the Lord only knows how many
more besides! Jombatiste is right ... what I'm doin' now is only a drop in
the bucket!"

She started from her somber reverie at the sound of a childish wail from
the house. ... "That's Sigurd ...I _knew_ that cat would scratch him!" she
told me with instant, breathless agitation, as though the skies were
falling, and darted back. After a moment's hesitation I too, went back and
watched her bind up with stiff, unaccustomed old fingers the little
scratched hand, watched the frightened little boy sob himself quiet on her
old knees that had never before known a child's soft weight saw the
expression in her eyes as she looked down at the sleeping baby and gazed
about the untidy room so full of mire, which had always been so orderly
and so empty.

She lifted the little boy up higher so that hi