of 'em."

Reuben merely nodded after him as he went, for he had grown too tired
to answer. A curious stillness--half happiness, half indifference--was
stealing over him, and he watched as in a dream, the blue figure of old
Adam hobble over the sun-flecked path through the orchard. A few minutes
later Molly flitted after the elder, and Reuben's eyes followed her with
the cheerful look with which he had faced seventy years of life. On a
rush mat in the sunshine the old hound flicked his long black ear at a
fly of which he was dreaming, and from a bower of ivy in the eaves there
came the twitter of sparrows. Beyond the orchard, the wind, blowing from
the marshes, chased the thin, sketchy shadows over the lawn at Jordan's
Journey.

While he sat there Reuben began to think, and as always, his thoughts
were humble and without self-consciousness. As he looked under
the gnarled boughs of the orchard, he seemed to see his whole life
stretching before him--seventy years--all just the same except that
with each he appeared a little older, a little humbler, a little less
expectant that some miracle might happen and change the future. At the
end of that long vista, he saw himself young and strong, and filled with
a great hope for something--he hardly knew what--that would make things
different. He had gone on, still hoping, year by year, and now at
the end, he was an old, bent, crippled man, and the miracle had never
happened. Nothing had ever made things different, and the great hope had
died in him at last as the twenty seeds of which old Adam had spoken had
died in the earth. He remembered all the things he had wanted that he
had never had--all the other things he had not wanted that had made up
his life. Never had a hope of his been fulfilled, never had an event
fallen out as he had planned it, never had a prayer brought him the
blessing for which he had prayed. Nothing in all his seventy years had
been just what he had wanted--not just what he would have chosen if the
choice had been granted him--yet the sight of the birds in the apple
trees stirred something in his heart to-day that was less an individual
note of rejoicing than a share in the undivided movement of life which
was pulsing around him. Nothing that had ever happened to him as Reuben
Merryweather would he care to live over; but he was glad at the end that
he had been a part of the spring and had not missed seeing the little
green leaves break out in the orchard.