wn concerning
them in that house, excepting that what portion of success and happiness
had been allotted to the family seemed all to have fallen to their
share.

They were vastly unpopular in the hamlet. Not that any but the very old
people remembered the day when they had first been missing, or what an
extraordinary effect their behaviour had produced on their mother; but
that the new generation had taken up her cause--the new parson also--and
that the story being still often told had lost nothing in the narration.

Parson Craik had always been poor old Madam's champion since his coming
among them. He had taken pains to ascertain the facts from the oldest
Ledger's old wife, and when first he heard her tell how she had opened
her door at dawn to let in her husband, during the great gale that was
rocking the orchard trees and filling the air with whirls of blossom,
that came down like a thick fall of snow, he made an observation which
was felt at the time to have an edifying power in it, and which was
incorporated with the story ever after. "And when I telled him how the
grete stack of chimneys fell not half-an-hour after, over the very place
where they had passed, and how they were in such a hurry to be off that
they jumped the edge for fear us should stop them or speak to them. Then
says Parson Craik to me, sitting as it might be there, and I a sitting
opposite (for I'd given him the big chair), says he to me, 'My friend,
we must lay our hands on our mouths when we hear of the afflictions of
the righteous. And yet man,' says he, 'man, when he hears of such
heartless actions, can but feel that it would have been a just judgment
on them, if the wind had been ordained in the hauling of those chimneys
down, to fling 'em on their undutiful heads.'"

Poor Madam Melcombe, her eldest son, whose heir she was, had caused the
stack of chimneys to be built up again; but she was never the same woman
from that day, and she had never seen those sons again (so far as was
known), or been reconciled to them. And now she had desired to be left
alone, and had expressly said, "I've made up my mind to write a letter
to my sons."

So she was left alone and undertook, with trembling hands and dimmed
eyes, her unwonted task. She wrote a letter which, if those about her
could have seen it, would certainly have affected their feelings, and
would perhaps have made them think more highly yet of her meek forgiving
nature, for she neither blamed