er who had overtaken her. "Go into the house!" he said. "If
the old woman has got any arrant at all, it's likely it's to your mother
and me."

Nor was his heart melted in the least when he learned that his friend
and neighbor was no more. He evinced surprise, and made some blunt and
coarse inquiries, but that was the amount. "The widder is left purty
destitute, I reckon," he said; and then he added, the Lord helped them
that helped themselves, and we mustn't fly in the face of Providence.
She had her son, strong and able-bodied; and of course he had no
thoughts of encumbering himself with a family of his own,--young and
poverty-struck as he was.

Mrs. Walker understood the insinuation; but her heart could not hold
resentment just then. She must relieve her burdened soul by talking of
"poor Johnny," even though it were to deaf ears. She must tell what a
good boy he had been,--how kind to her and considerate of her, how
manly, how generous, how self-forgetful. And then she must tell how hard
he had worked, and how saving he had been in order to give his children
a better chance in the world than he had had; and how, if he had lived
another year, he would have paid off the mortgage, and been able to hold
up his head amongst men.

After all the ploughing and sowing,--after all the preparation for the
gathering in of the harvest,--it seemed very hard, she said, that Johnny
must be called away, just as the shining ears began to appear. The
circumstances of his death, too, seemed to her peculiarly afflictive.
"We had all the doctors in the neighborhood," she said, "but none of
them understood his case. At first they thought he had small-pox, and
doctored him for that; and then they thought it was liver-complaint, and
doctored him for that; and then it was bilious fever, and then it was
typhus fever; and so it went on, and I really can't believe any of them
understood anything about it. Their way seemed to be to do just what he
didn't want done. In the first place, he was bled; and then he was
blistered; and then he was bled again and blistered again, the fever all
the time getting higher and higher; and when he wanted water, they said
it would kill him, and gave him hot drinks till it seemed to me they
would drive him mad; and sure enough, they did! The last word he ever
said, to know what he was saying, was to ask me for a cup of cold water.
I only wish I had given it to him; all the doctors in the world wouldn't
prevent m