d under the
family roof-tree, fed by our father's bounty and looking to our father's
justice for that share of his savings which he had promised to all
alike. When he died it came to me as it came to you; but I had married
before that day--married, not, like the rest of you, for what a wife
could bring, but for sentiment and true passion. This, in my case, meant
a loving wife, but a frail one; and while we lived a little while on the
patrimony left us, it was far too small to support us long without some
aid from our own hands; and our hands were feeble and could not work.
And so we fell into debt for rent and, ere long, for the commonest
necessities of life. In vain I struggled to redeem myself; the time of
my prosperity had not come, and I only sank deeper and deeper into debt,
and finally into indigence. A baby came. Our landlord was kind, and
allowed us to stay for two weeks under the roof for whose protection we
could not pay; but at the end of that time we were asked to leave, and I
found myself on the road with a dying wife, a wailing infant, no money
in my purse, and no power in my arm to earn any. Then, when heart and
hope were both failing, I recalled that ancient oath and the six
prosperous homes scattered up and down the very highway on which I
stood. I could not leave my wife; the fever was in her veins, and she
could not bear me out of her sight; so I put her on a horse, which a
kind old neighbour was willing to lend me, and holding her up with one
hand, guided the horse with the other to the home of my brother Luke.
He was a straight enough fellow in those days--physically, I mean--and
he looked able and strong that morning, as he stood in the open doorway
of his house, gazing down at us as we halted before him in the roadway.
But his temper had grown greedy with the accumulation of a few dollars,
and he shook his head as he closed his door, saying he remembered no
oath, and that spenders must expect to be beggars.

"'Struck to the heart by a rebuff which meant prolongation of the
suffering I saw in my dear wife's eyes, I stretched up and kissed her
where she sat half fainting on the horse; then I moved on. I came to
Barbara's home next. She had been a little mother to me once--that is,
she had fed and dressed me, and doled out blows and caresses, and taught
me to read and sing. But Barbara in her father's home and without
fortune was not the Barbara I saw on the threshold of the little cottage
she called