"Shut your
eyes and sign it and then forget it. Awful, ain't it?--but that's the
law, and there ain't no way of getting round it, I guess."

Hiram Taylor had left the village years before, rather suddenly, some
had thought, when he was a strapping young fellow of twenty-two or
three, and had moved West and stayed West until he came back the year
before with a wife and a houseful of children. Then the lawyers in the
village got busy, and pretty soon some builders came down from Boston,
only fifty miles away, and then a lot of bricklayers; and some cars were
switched off on the siding, loaded with lumber and lath and brick, and
next a train-load of machinery, and so the mills were running again
with Hiram sole owner and in full charge. One of the first things he did
after his arrival--the following morning, really--was to look up Abbie's
mother. He gave a littie start when he saw how shabby the cottage
looked; no paint for years--steps rotting--window-blinds broken, with a
hinge loose. He gave a big one when a thin, hollow-chested woman, gray
and spare, opened the door at his knock.

"Hiram!" she gasped, and the two went inside, and the door was shut.

All she said when Abbie came home from school--she was teaching that
year--was: "The new mill-owner came to see me. His name's Taylor."

That same day a heavy-set man with gray hair and beard, and jet-black
eyebrows shading two kindly eyes, got out of his wagon, hitched his
horse to a post in front of the school-house and stepped to Abbie's
desk.

"I'm Hiram Taylor, up to the mills. Going to send one of my girls to
you to-morrow and thought I'd drop in." Then he looked around and said:
"Want another coat of whitewash on these walls, don't you, and--and
a new stove? This don't seem to be drawin' like it ought to. If them
trustees won't get ugly about it, I got a new stove up to the mill I
don't want, and I'll send it down." And he did. The trustees shrugged
their shoulders, but made no objections. If Hiram Taylor wanted to throw
his money away it was none of their business. Abbie Todd never said she
was cold--not as they had "heard on."

When the new school building was finished--a brick structure with stone
trimmings, steam-heated, and varnished desks and seats--the craze for
the new and up-to-date so dominated the board that they paid Abbie a
month's salary in advance and then replaced her with a man graduate from
Concord. Abbie took her dismissal as a matter of cour