gal of every element of discomfort,
and never had the hero of my story been more cast down in heart and
hope than on this chaotic day which, even to his dull fancy, appeared
closing in harmony with his feelings and fortune. He is going home,
yet the thought brings no assurance of welcome and comfort. As he
cowers upon the seat of his market wagon, he is to the reader what he
is in the fading light--a mere dim outline of a man. His progress is
so slow that there will be plenty of time to relate some facts about
him which will make the scenes and events to follow more intelligible.

James Holcroft is a middle-aged man and the owner of a small, hilly
farm. He had inherited his rugged acres from his father, had always
lived upon them, and the feeling had grown strong with the lapse of
time that he could live nowhere else. Yet he knew that he was, in the
vernacular of the region, "going down-hill." The small savings of
years were slowly melting away, and the depressing feature of this
truth was that he did not see how he could help himself. He was not a
sanguine man, but rather one endowed with a hard, practical sense which
made it clear that the down-hill process had only to continue
sufficiently long to leave him landless and penniless. It was all so
distinct on this dismal evening that he groaned aloud.

"If it comes to that, I don't know what I'll do--crawl away on a night
like this and give up, like enough."

Perhaps he was right. When a man with a nature like his "gives up,"
the end has come. The low, sturdy oaks that grew so abundantly along
the road were types of his character--they could break, but not bend.
He had little suppleness, little power to adapt himself to varied
conditions of life. An event had occurred a year since, which for
months, he could only contemplate with dull wonder and dismay. In his
youth he had married the daughter of a small farmer. Like himself, she
had always been accustomed to toil and frugal living. From childhood
she had been impressed with the thought that parting with a dollar was
a serious matter, and to save a dollar one of the good deeds rewarded
in this life and the life to come. She and her husband were in
complete harmony on this vital point. Yet not a miserly trait entered
into their humble thrift. It was a necessity entailed by their meager
resources; it was inspired by the wish for an honest independence in
their old age.

There was to be no old age for