live there
all your days, same 's we're goin' to live here."

Herman turned impetuously upon his father. There was a great rush of
life to his face, and his father saw it and understood, in the amazement
of it, things he had never stopped to consider about the boy who had
miraculously grown to be a man. But Herman was finding something in his
father's jaded mien. It stopped him on the tide of happiness, and he
spoke impetuously.

"She's dragged it out o' you! Mother's been tellin' you! I don't want it
that way, father, not unless it's your own free will. I won't have it no
other way."

It was a man's word to a man. Myron straightened himself to his former
bearing. In a flash of memory he remembered the day when his father, an
old-fashioned man, had given him his freedom suit and shaken hands with
him and wished him well. Involuntarily he put out his hand.

"It's my own will, Hermie," he said, in a tone they had not heard from
him since the day, eighteen years behind them, when the boy Hermie was
rescued from the "old swimmin'-hole." "We'll have the deeds drawed up
to-morrer."

They stood an instant, hands gripped, regarding each other in the
allegiance not of blood alone. The clasp broke, and they remembered the
woman and turned to her. There she stood, trembling a little, but
apparently removed from all affairs too large for her. She had taken a
cover from the stove, and was obviously reflecting on the next step in
her domestic progress.

"I guess you better bring me in a handful o' that fine kindlin',
Hermie," she remarked, in her wonted tone of brisk suggestion, "so 's 't
I can brash up the fire. I sha'n't have dinner on the stroke--not 'fore
half-past one."

THE ADVOCATE

"You goin'?" called Isabel Wilde from the road, to Ardelia, sitting
forlornly on the front steps.

It was seven o'clock of a wonderful August morning, with all the bloom
of summer and the lull of fall. Isabel was a dark, strong young creature
who walked with her head in the air, and Ardelia, pretty and frail and
perfect in her own small way, looked like a child in comparison. Isabel
had been down to carry a frosted cake to her little niece Ellen, for
Ellen's share of the picnic at Poole's Woods. It was Fairfax day, when
once a year all Fairfax went to the spot where the first settlers drank
of the "b'ilin' spring" on their way to a clearing.

"You goin'?" she called again, imperiously, and Ardelia answered, as if
from some unw