ly hostile to her admirers. She seldom rode
with us to spelling schools or "soshybles." There was always some youth
with a cutter, or some noisy group in a big bob-sleigh to carry her
away, and on Monday morning father drove her back to the county town
with growing pride in her improving manners.

Her course at the Seminary was cut short in early spring by a cough
which came from a long ride in the keen wind. She was very ill with a
wasting fever, yet for a time refused to go to bed. She could not resign
herself to the loss of her school-life.

The lack of room in our house is brought painfully to my mind as I
recall that she lay for a week or two in a corner of our living room
with all the noise and bustle of the family going on around her. Her own
attic chamber was unwarmed (like those of all her girl friends), and so
she was forced to lie near the kitchen stove.

She grew rapidly worse all through the opening days of April and as we
were necessarily out in the fields at work, and mother was busied with
her household affairs, the lonely sufferer was glad to have her bed in
the living room--and there she lay, her bright eyes following mother at
her work, growing whiter and whiter until one beautiful, tragic morning
in early May, my father called me in to say good-bye to her.

She was very weak, but her mind was perfectly clear, and as she kissed
me farewell with a soft word about being a good boy, I turned away
blinded with tears and fled to the barnyard, there to hide like a
wounded animal, appalled by the weight of despair and sorrow which her
transfigured face had suddenly thrust upon me. All about me the young
cattle called, the spring sun shone and the gay fowls sang, but they
could not mitigate my grief, my dismay, my sense of loss. My sister was
passing from me--that was the agonizing fact which benumbed me. She who
had been my playmate, my comrade, was about to vanish into air and
earth!

This was my first close contact with death, and it filled me with awe.
Human life suddenly seemed fleeting and of a part with the impermanency
and change of the westward moving Border Line.--Like the wild flowers
she had gathered, Harriet was now a fragrant memory. Her dust mingled
with the soil of the little burial ground just beyond the village
bounds.

* * * * *

My mother's heart was long in recovering from the pain of this loss, but
at last Jessie's sweet face, which had in it the li