ed down; a
silence in which sorrowing men and women crept about, weeping as those who
cannot be comforted.

Then week followed after week, and soon all things seemed as they had
seemed before. But Draxy never died to her people. Her hymns are still
sung in the little lonely church; her gospel still lives in the very air
of those quiet hills, and the people smile through their tears as they
teach her name to little children.

Whose Wife Was She?

I was on my knees before my chrysanthemum-bed, looking at each little
round tight disk of a bud, and trying to believe that it would be a snowy
flower in two weeks. In two weeks my cousin Annie Ware was to be married:
if my white chrysanthemums would only understand and make haste! I was
childish enough to tell them so; but the childishness came of love,--of my
exceeding, my unutterable love for Annie Ware; if flowers have souls, the
chrysanthemums understood me.

A sharp, quick roll of wheels startled me. I lifted my head. The wheels
stopped at our gate; a hurried step came down the broad garden-path, and
almost before I had had time to spring to my feet, Dr. Fearing had taken
both my hands in his, had said,--"Annie Ware has the fever,"--had turned,
had gone, had shut the garden gate, and the same sharp quick roll of
wheels told that he was far on his way to the next sufferer.

I do not know how long I stood still in the garden. A miserable sullenness
seemed to benumb my faculties. I repeated,--

"Annie Ware has the fever." Then I said,--

"Annie Ware cannot die; she is too young, too strong, and we love her
so."

Then I said again,--

"Annie Ware has the fever," and all the time I seemed not to be thinking
about her at all, but about the chrysanthemums, whose tops I still idly
studied.

For weeks a malignant typhus fever had been slowly creeping about in the
lower part of our village, in all the streets which had been under water
in the spring freshet.

These streets were occupied chiefly by laboring people, either
mill-operatives, or shopkeepers of the poorer class. It was part of the
cruel "calamity" of their "poverty" that they could not afford to have
homesteads on the high plateau, which lifted itself quite suddenly from
the river meadow, and made our village a by-word of beauty all through New
England.

Upon this plateau were laid out streets of great regularity, shaded by
grand elms, many of which had been planted by hands that had handled the