the saddle and the bridle
outside the door, let the sorrel trot in alone, and ran toward the
kitchen.

When the doctor completed his diagnosis that night, he told the little
girl's mother only what she had long known: that she might live to see
her daughter a grown woman and her sons old men; that she might pass
away before the end of another week, or another day. The little girl was
not in the room to hear him, and on returning later to the canopied bed,
neither her mother nor the neighbor woman repeated his words. He was
gone again, leaving only a few pellets to check a possible
sinking-spell. For there was nothing else that could be done at the
farm-house--except wait and hope.

But, as if she divined by instinct what there was to fear, the little
girl stoutly refused to leave her mother that night and seek rest.
After prevailing upon the neighbor woman to lie down on the lounge close
by, she sat on the carpet beside the bed, weary but unswerving, and
reached up every little while to touch a hand, or rose to listen to the
spasmodic beating of the tortured heart.

At midnight her mother awoke and asked for nourishment. Having eaten and
drunk, she motioned the little girl to a seat on the edge of the bed and
began to talk, slowly at the beginning but more hurriedly toward the
last, as if she were freeing herself of something long ago thought out
and long delayed in the saying.

"I've been thinking of the fields and hedges of dear old England," she
whispered. "I can see them so plainly to-night. I have just been there
in my dreams, I think; and I have come back to tell you how beautiful
they are. Of course the plains are beautiful, too,--beautiful but
lonely. England is dotted with homes, and there are trees everywhere,
and flowers so many months of the year. Oh, one never could feel lonely
there."

She turned her face away and seemed to be asleep. But presently she came
back to the little girl and took her hand with a smile.

"Years ago," she went on, "when I was a hearty, happy girl, only two or
three years older than you are now, pet lamb, your father and I came
West and took up this farm. Hardly anybody lived here in those days.
They were a few squatters; but they either trapped in the winter and
went away during the summer, or hunted and farmed in the summer and left
in the fall. So life was very quiet, quieter even than it is now, except
that there were Indians here by the hundreds. They stole from us by