eeded the
kitchen and a tiny bedroom that led out of it, and there still remained
the best room and a bedroom, with the low garret overhead.

There had been a time, after she was left alone, when Mrs. Robb could
help those who were poorer than herself. She was strong enough not
only to do a woman's work inside her house, but almost a man's work
outside in her piece of garden ground. At last sickness and age had
come hand in hand, those two relentless enemies of the poor, and
together they had wasted her strength and substance. She had always
been looked up to by her neighbors as being independent, but now she
was left, lame-footed and lame-handed, with a debt to carry and her
bare land, and the house ill-provisioned to stand the siege of time.

For a while she managed to get on, but at last it began to be whispered
about that there was no use for any one so proud; it was easier for the
whole town to care for her than for a few neighbors, and Mrs. Robb had
better go to the poorhouse before winter, and be done with it. At this
terrible suggestion her brave heart seemed to stand still. The people
whom she cared for most happened to be poor, and she could no longer go
into their households to make herself of use. The very elms overhead
seemed to say, "Oh, no!" as they groaned in the late autumn winds, and
there was something appealing even to the strange passer-by in the look
of the little gray house, with Mrs. Robb's pale, worried face at the
window.

II.

Some one has said that anniversaries are days to make other people
happy in, but sometimes when they come they seem to be full of shadows,
and the power of giving joy to others, that inalienable right which
ought to lighten the saddest heart, the most indifferent sympathy,
sometimes even this seems to be withdrawn.

So poor old Mary Ann Robb sat at her window on the afternoon before
Thanksgiving and felt herself poor and sorrowful indeed. Across the
frozen road she looked eastward over a great stretch of cold meadow
land, brown and wind-swept and crossed by icy ditches. It seemed to
her as if before this, in all the troubles that she had known and
carried, there had always been some hope to hold: as if she had never
looked poverty full in the face and seen its cold and pitiless look
before. She looked anxiously down the road, with a horrible shrinking
and dread at the thought of being asked, out of pity, to join in some
Thanksgiving feast, but there wa