ceful hangings, the broad doors, the
pictures, and the flowers, there came upon him a sense of strange
familiarity with the scene. It seemed to him as though sometime,
somewhere, he had seen it, known it all before. The feeling was so
sudden and so strong that it made him faint and dizzy.

The kind-featured woman saw the pallor on his face and the tremor on
his lips, and led him to a chair. She ascribed his weakness to sorrow
and excitement, and the dread of looking on a dead face.

"Poor boy!" she said. "I don't wonder at it; he was more than generous
to us all."

But Joe, afraid that the resolutions he had labored on with so much
diligence would be forgotten, spoke of them again to Ralph.

"Oh, yes," said Ralph, with a wan smile, "oh, yes! here's the
res'lutions. That's the way the breaker boys feel--the way it says in
this paper; an' we want Mrs. Burnham to know."

"I'll take it to her," said the woman, receiving from Ralph's hands
the awkwardly folded and now sadly soiled paper. "You will wait here a
moment, please."

She passed up the broad staircase, by the richly colored window at the
landing, and was lost to sight; while the two boys, sitting in the
spacious hall, gazed, with wondering eyes, upon the beauty which
surrounded them.

The widow of Robert Burnham sat in the morning-room of her desolated
home, talking calmly with her friends.

After the first shock incident upon her husband's death had passed
away, she had made no outcry, she grew quiet and self-possessed, she
was ready for any consultation, gave all necessary orders, spoke
of her dead husband's goodness to her with a smile on her face, and
looked calmly forth into the future. The shock of that terrible
message from the mines, two days ago, had paralyzed her emotional
nature, and left her white-faced and tearless.

She had a smile and a kind word for every one as before; she had eaten
mechanically; but she had lain with wide-open eyes all night, and
still no one had seen a single tear upon her cheeks. This was why they
feared for her; they said,

"She must weep, or she will die."

Some one came into the room and spoke to her.

"The breaker boys, who asked to come this morning, are here."

"Let them come in," she said, "and pass through the parlors and look
upon him; and let them be treated with all kindness and courtesy."

"They have brought this paper, containing resolutions passed by them,
which they would like to have you read."