e Laura's private signal. Do not strain your eyes over the
"Semi-weekly" more.

No! dear Laura's eyes will be dimmed by other cares than the ship-news.
Tom's father, who had shared Tom's wretchedness, and would gladly have
had them at his home, but that Moses Marvel's was the larger and the
less peopled of the two,--Tom's father was brought home speechless one
day, by the men who found him where he had fallen on the road, his yoke
of oxen not far away, waiting for the voice which they were never to
hear again. Whether he had fallen from the cart, in some lurch it made,
and broken his spine, or whether all this distress had brought on of a
sudden a stroke of paralysis, so that he lost his consciousness before
he fell, I do not know. Nor do I see that it matters much, though the
chimney-corners of Tripp's Cove discuss the question quite eagerly to
this hour. He lay there month after month, really unconscious. He smiled
gently when they brought him food. He tried to say "Thank you," they
thought, but he did not speak to the wife of his bosom, who had been the
Laura Marvel of her day, in any different way from that in which he
tried to speak to any stranger of them all. A living death he lay in as
those tedious months went by.

Yet my dear Laura was as cheerful, and hopeful, and buoyant as ever. Tom
Cutts himself was ashamed to brood when he got a sight of her. Mother
Cutts herself would lie down and rest herself when Laura came round,
with the two children, as she did every afternoon. Moses Marvel himself
was less taciturn when Laura put the boys, one at one side, one at the
other, of his chair, at the tea-table. And in both of those broken
households, from one end to the other, they knew the magic of dear
Laura's spells. So that when this Christmas came, after poor Mr. Cutts
had been lying senseless so long,--when dear Laura bade them all take
hold and fit up a Christmas-tree, with all the adornments, for the
little boys, and for the Spaulding children, and the Marvel cousins, and
the Hopkinses, and the Tredgolds, and the Newmarch children,--they all
obeyed her loyally, and without wondering. They obeyed her, with her own
determination that they would have one merry Christmas more. It seems a
strange thing to people who grew up outside of New England. But this was
the first Christmas tree ever seen at Tripp's Cove, for all such
festivities are of recent importation in such regions. But there was
something for every child