g, serious-minded, intelligent boy.
Then the girls, both bright, reached the next to the last grade in the
country school. And Tom Jennings and Martha Jennings his wife determined
that each of them should have a college education. So Tom worked very
hard and Martha saved very closely. And the fall day came when Frank
left home to go to college in Greenville; then another day, the fall
following, when the girls left, also. Thus Martha and Tom and Mac were
left alone on the farm.

"You know," said Tom once (he was a simple, religious man), "I sometimes
think it's a strange thing, Mother, that that poor dog should have been
struck while he was takin' shelter under the Word of God. I know he
ain't nothin' but a dog, but I reckon God made him. I don't see why God
struck him."

"Maybe there was purpose in it, Tom," said his wife.

Then hard luck came to Tom Jennings just at the time when the bills for
the children's second matriculation were due. First, the river rose and
drowned some of his cattle and ruined a good deal of corn that had not
been gathered. He worked hard, even desperately, to save what he could
and not let the children know. Then Tom himself was taken with a queer
feeling in the chest, a feeling of tightness and dull pain and shortness
of breath. Martha pleaded with him a long time to consult a doctor in
Greenville before he consented to do so.

The doctor listened with a stethoscope placed on the farmer's chest.
"Sit down, Jennings," he said at last. "Jennings, your heart leaks.
You've overstrained it. You must never do any more hard manual work."

"But, Doctor----" Tom began.

"No buts about it. You are too good a man to drop off. You must go slow.
You mustn't even walk fast. You must never run, and you must not lift
heavy weights. Why don't you sell your farm and move to town?"

"But the children, Doctor. I'm trying to give 'em a better chance than I
had or their mother."

"That's all right, Jennings. But we have to trim our sails to meet life
as it is. Your heart leaks, man! You've done what you could for your
children. They'll just have to shift for themselves."

Tom Jennings drove slowly home. Martha, not knowing the purpose of his
visit to town that day, had gone to see Mrs. Taylor, a neighbour. Even
Mac was not in the yard to welcome him. He put up his horse, then sat
down on the back steps to do the hardest thinking he had ever done.

At first it seemed to him like providence that just rec