and
preach in it. Mr. Maynard had been his classmate in college and loved him
very much, just because they were 'so different,' papa said, and I think
it must have been so, for Mr. Maynard is the merriest man I ever saw. He
laughs as soon as he sees you, whether there is anything to laugh at or
not, and he makes you feel just like laughing yourself, simply by asking
you how you do. I never saw papa so happy as he was the day Mr. Maynard's
letter came asking him to go there.

"It was a very kind letter, and the salary, of which Mr. Maynard spoke
almost apologetically, saying that it would be increased in a few years as
the village grew, was more than twice as large as papa had ever received,
and there was a nice parsonage besides.

"We moved in April. I always associate our moving with blue hepaticas, for
I carried a great basketful of them, which I had taken up roots and all,
in the woods, the morning we set out; and what should I find under papa's
study window but a great thicket of wild ferns and cornel bushes
growing--just the place for my hepaticas, and I set them out before I went
into the house. The house was very small, but it was so pretty that papa
and I were perfectly happy in it. Poor mamma did not like the closets and
the kitchen. The house we had left was a huge, old-fashioned house, with
four square rooms on a floor; one of these was the kitchen, and mamma
missed it very much. But she lived only a few days after we moved in. I
never knew of what disease she died. She was ill but a few hours and
suffered great pain. They said she had injured herself in some way in
lifting the furniture. It was all so sudden and so terrible, and we were
surrounded by such confusion and so many strange faces, that I do not
remember anything about it distinctly. I remember the funeral, and the
great masses of white and purple flowers all over the table on which the
coffin stood, and I remember how strangely papa's face looked.

"And then Aunt Abby came to live with us, and we settled down into such a
new, different life, that it seemed to me as if it had been in some other
world that I had known mamma. My sister Abby was two years old, and my
darling brother Nat was ten, when mamma died. It is very hard to talk
about dear Nat, I love him so. He is so precious, and his sorrow is so
sacred, that I am hardly willing to let strangers pity him, ever so
tenderly. When he was a baby he sprang out of mamma's lap, one day, as she
was