"Dear me!" said she at close of the latter agitating performance, "I've turned up the 'g' in Cargill the wrong way. Why now I knew just as well as I know anything which way a 'g' ought to turn up!" "I shall deposit the $500 in the bank and you can at any time draw from it for extra spending money. For all your ordinary wants I shall myself provide," Samuel had said.

A few weeks afterwards Esther sat in her best neighbor's house waiting for the carriage in which Samuel was to take her to the depot en route for his home.

"I felt pretty badly, Mis' Russ, to see my things sold off,-my table-cloths, an' towels, an' blankets that I had afore I was married, and the things that I've kept house with. Seems as if when the things you've worked and planned all your life to get are sold off, seems as if your past life was just swept away, seems as if your life had n't amounted to much; why now, don't it, Mis' Russ? "I suppose, Mrs. Cargill, we get to thinking too much of our things. St. Paul says, you know, 'Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth.'"

"Samuel let me keep the spoons, and that's pretty much all," said Aunt Esther with a sigh.

Mrs. Samuel Cargill assigned her motherin-law a comfortable back upper room, sent up her food whenever there was fashionable company in the dining-room, let her down when there was no company, and saw that she was always warmly and suitably dressed. On Sundays she sometimes went up herself and read a chapter in the Bible aloud. Mrs. Samuel thought old people ought to read or hear the Bible a good deal,-especially if they were poor.

After a year or two Aunt Esther was seized with a longing to visit North Upton. Mrs. Samuel said she did n't see that there was anything to prevent her going if she desired.

North Upton warmly welcomed the Widow Cargill in her outward signs of prosperity. When, however, after two or three months she announced her intention of remaining indefinitely the mercury of welcome sank, but rose again to cool equilib

rium when she continued that she should pay her way by sewing or nursing the sick.

After recovering from a fever contracted in her gratuitous nursing, Aunt Esther wrote to Samuel inquiring how she should meet her bills. Samuel replied, “You may as well draw from your savings bank deposit; it will make no material difference in the end."

He was about to add that she had better return to his house, but Mrs. Samuel said she saw no necessity for that; Mother Cargill of course knew she could return at anytime.

Aunt Esther found it necessary to draw an additional sum for clothes, and she fell into the habit of drawing according to her need.

Suddenly Samuel Cargill died. Like his father he left no will. His estate proved not absolutely insolvent, but Mrs. Samuel found it necessary to break up housekeeping and go to live with a married daughter.

"I don't know what 'll become of me, Mis' Russ," said Aunt Esther; "but the Lord always has taken care of me and I s'pose He always will. Were you going to have this pair of Mr. Russ' stockings footed with the blue-mixed or with Shaker yarn?”

A few tears dropped silently upon Mr. Russ' hosiery.

Wherever henceforth Aunt Esther for a few weeks found a home she labored beyond her strength. North Upton matrons, as they wended their way to the fortnightly meetings of the Ladies' Benevolent Society, congratulated themselves upon a superior household economy in securing for board alone services equivalent to what a highprice domestic would have rendered.

Aunt Esther had a slight paralytic shock. Mrs. Russ wrote to Mrs. Samuel Cargill. Mrs. Samuel felt no assurance that her own presence was fully appreciated by her sonin-law. Certainly she could n't ask him to also receive her husband's step-mother. She hopefully concluded that Mother Cargill had "friends" who would provide for her, and did not write.

Aunt Esther's days of efficiency were ended. Mrs. Russ privately held an interview with the Chairman of the North Upton

Board of Overseers of the poor, and offered to keep Aunt Esther at reasonable boarding rates. Esquire Jarves shook his head; North Upton could n't afford that.

The Board had given notice that it would be in session at the Selectmen's Office on April 1, to receive proposals and seal contracts for the support of paupers the ensuing three years.

Mr. and Mrs. Bob Crosby were on their way to the office. Mr. Crosby drove one white horse and one sorrel one. The animals were tightly check-reined; but their preternatural animation in connection with their evident ascetic habits awoke startling suggestions, confused images of apocalyptic mystery and horror. Death rode a pale horse; War bestrode a red one. If, however, these steeds were amenable to laws of matter, the thick leather straps and heavy buckles of their loosely-fitting harnesses could be trusted to hold them to earth.

"I shall offer to take the old lady, George, and Hannah for three hundred a year, and I cal'clate to get help enough from them so that I can take summer boarders, and if we can't make enough out of boarders and paupers together to pay off the debts and give Gertrude Estella an elg-ucation, the fault won't be mine, Crosby."

"Boarders cost like the deuce. Aunt Esther will want tea three times a day and Hannah has the 'polepsy."

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Paupers may be glad to get fifty cent tea even if it does have green sediment at the bottom, and Hannah don't have those fits very often now. You just let me manage this affair, Crosby."

Attendance at the Selectmen's office for pauper negotiations being usually thin, ladies like Mrs. Crosby and her rival Mrs. Pratt could appear there without detriment to the bloom of their natural feminine delicacy.

Hannah, whose occasional epileptic attacks had been attended by no further effects upon her intellect than to render her more honest than the human average, was considered the chef d'œuvre of the pauper lot. The Board, however, perfectly understood Hannah's value, and had resolutely reduced the price from $75 to $50 per annum. In

conjunction with this reduction the thrifty rival matrons enlarged the scope of their imaginations concerning the amount of work to be exacted from Hannah, and competition continued brisk.

Hannah, however, was not to be disposed of without extraneous considerations. The Board wished to place the three orphan O'Brien children under her protection. Mrs. Crosby scoffed at the orphans,-in a business light, and Mrs. Pratt secured Hannah.

Esquire Jarves wished Mrs. Crosby to include in her selections Uncle Titus, an infirm but unrepentant sinner absolutely unproductive as labor material, but Mrs. Crosby remained firm on Aunt Esther and George at $200 per annum.

Between the former southern custom of disposing of an unfortunate to the highest bidder, and the occasional northern and western practice of knocking him off to the lowest bidder, exists an area sufficiently broad for the introduction of some mild hu manitarian consideration; as, for instance, Esquire Jarves in buttoning up his spring overcoat after the transaction had been closed and the contracting parties had withdrawn remarked:

"If I could have selected I should have taken a different man than Crosby. I'm sorry Crosby drinks, but his wife seems to be a good-hearted woman?"

The latter clause assumed a slight interrogative rise towards the third man.

The third man had been placed upon the Board that he might, under certain contingencies, by alliance with the second man preserve the balance of power against the 'squire. The indispensable 'Squire had been so long in office that North Upton voters even of his own political party had become alive to the dangers of absolutism. The third man had, however, disappointed his constituents by yielding to the magnetism of his superior colleague, and the 'Squire's end of the Board always went down with a force that left the second man dangling dangerously and conspicuously high in heavens on the outer edge of the Board.

At four o'clock on this gray, squally, April day, Mr. Crosby curbed his horses before Mrs. Russ' door with a suddenness that brought the gaunt creatures on their haunches and lifted their harnesses two or three inches. One end of a board laid across the back of the long wooden wagon was occupied by the half-wit George; the opposite end was reserved for Aunt Esther. Aunt Esther and Mrs. Russ were taking an early tea; the latter, whose sympathetic heart was full of anxious forebodings, having made an unsurpassable cup and opened one of her best cans of peaches.

"Mrs. Russ," exclaimed Aunt Esther rising from the table, as she overheard Mr. Crosby's errand at the door, "has Samuel's wife throwed me on the town?"

"We have n't heard from Samuel's wife, and Mr. Jarves thinks perhaps you'd better go and stay with Mrs. Crosby awhile. Perhaps by fall I shall want you again."

The thin old woman trembled as a leaf of white poplar trembles above its thin, innutritious soil.

"Why Mis' Russ, I never thought I'd come upon the town. Mr. Cargill did 'n't expect I'd come upon the town. None of my folks was ever-on the town. Why! why don't Samuel's wife write?" "Don't be all day in getting ready!" cried the voice of Mr. Crosby.

"Hurry up there!" vociferated Mr. Crosby.

"O get my shawl, Mis' Russ,-never mind my gloves. I must hurry,-O I never thought,—you can keep my tea-spoons that I had afore I was married, Mis' Russ! 0, I never thought—”

Assisted by Mrs. Russ the agitated old lady clambered into the wagon.

Over hard-frozen April mud with its hoofmarks and wheel ruts, over patches of ice alternating with old snow-banks jolted the wagon with its wrought-iron springs.

"O dear, I'm most dead,-riding without a robe or any back to the seat. I wonder if I could n't sit down in the bottom of the wagon," said Aunt Esther at the expiration of a half-hour.

George grinned. Mrs. Crosby turned her head.

"I guess you can stand it; we're almost there."

Mr. Crosby curbed his animated steeds before a decent farm-house. A young person with a modish coiffure but an unmodish protrusion of hair-pins came out to inspect the arrivals.

"I don't know who you think is going to do the work if you have n't got Hannah; I'm sure I shan't," said Gertrude Estella, scowling vindictively at Aunt Esther.

Aunt Esther that night found her sleeping-room on the ground floor of an old extension recently moved up and attached to Mr. Crosby's residence. The two north windows rattled in their casements; the east looked out gloomily upon sheds and shed-yards.

On a faded fragment of carpet,within walls not too mutilated to afford resonance, in the bleakness of of old age, in the chill of utter loneliness, Aunt Esther knelt and begged to be forgiven the sins for which God was punishing her. She may have dimly hoped for an interposition that should bear her away to friends, warmth and quiet. To appearances the sound of her strong crying only moved the cobweb-lined strips of border-paper, torn and pendulous above her head.

Mr. Crosby struck the outside of the door with his heavy boot, and the iron latch rattled in its catch.

Mrs. Crosby and Gertrude Estella mingled their loud laughs. Aunt Esther hastened to retire, more crouching, more tremulous, with a shamed sensitive fear of having violated some unknown canon of propriety.

Mrs. Crosby's scheme for taking boarders was frustrated, but she fully utilized Aunt Esther's capabilities, and the old lady was eager to labor, still cherishing the hope that she might be found able to "pay her way." She had, however,a trembling uncertainty of touch productive of accidents and a wavering judgment concerning practical ends that subjected her to loud reproach or coarse derision; but she was exempt from the physical abuse that fell to the lot of slow, obtuse George.

Mr. Jarves had forbidden blows, but Mrs. Crosby did not construe this prohibition to include "a good shaking up," nor did Mr. Crosby consider it inimical to the corrective influences inherent in a number eight leather sole. George was worked with no allowance for bodily weakness concomitant upon an imperfectly developed brain, and Mrs. Crosby measured out his food by a private standard illy according with his voracious appetite. When he had no evening tasks he liked to crouch beside Aunt Esther, whose voice and touch he found soothing to his rasped nerves.

By the second winter, hard work and insufficient nutrition began to have a perceptible effect on George. All one windy February day he lay feverishly tossing on the hard cord and straw mattress of his old bedstead in the wood-room chamber. Aunt Esther dragged herself up the dangerously steep stairs to carry him herb drinks.

When at eleven o'clock in the evening he heard the vehement whoas that signaled Mr. Crosby's return from the village, he crawled down, lighted his lantern and went out as customary.

Village whisky aggravated Crosby's natural roughness into positive brutality. Impatient at the boy's dullness the man kicked him over upon the ice, and himself led the horses into the stable. A half-hour later

The remainder of the night he lay on the dining-room lounge, a slight effusion of blood escaping his mouth, and Mrs. Crosby vainly attempting to rally him by sharply calling his name or by the enticements of a glass of steaming sling held beneath his nostrils. Mr. Crosby had become too stupefied to be fully conscious of what was transpiring. Within twenty-four hours George died.

Aunt Esther received increase of consideration. Mr. Crosby iterated and reiterated his explanations of how George slipped and fell on the ice.

"I'd no idea though," added he, with sharp glance at Aunt Esther, "but that he'd pick himself up and go to bed."

"I don't allow any tattlin' in my family," irrelevantly remarked Mrs. Crosby. "Folks that are imagining things and telling things and trying to get other folks into trouble generally gets the worst of it with me. Any one who consults her own good with me will keep her tongue between her teeth." "I don't know for my part what there is to tattle," said Mr. Crosby.

The ice in the shed-yard had a stain upon it; Mr. Crosby broke up that ice.

When Mr. Jarves came, Aunt Esther in a neat dress sat in an easy-chair by the dining-room fire. While Mr. and Mrs. Crosby explained the circumstances of George's death her knitting-needles rattled excitedly. Once she spoke crossly to the cat; Mrs. Crosby looked at her threateningly.

George's grave was made at the foot of a pasture boulder. No flower but the houstonia grows thereon. Under its name of innocence, the houstonia may be fitly emblematic of the soul set free that February night from the untoward limitations imposed by no transgression of its own.

Mrs. Crosby consented to take Uncle Titus in George's place, at an advanced rate, for Uncle Titus was not only unpro ductive but was an inveterate complainer in the ears of the Board.