r noisy woe of mourning,--ticking without
joy when the smiles and gayety of comforted heirs had come back again.
She looked at herself in the tall, bevelled mirror in the best chamber.
She pulled aside the curtains of the stately bedstead whereon the heads
of the house had slept until they died and were stretched out upon it,
and the sheet shaped itself to them in vague, awful breadth of outline,
like a block of monumental marble the sculptor leaves just hinted by the
chisel.

She groped her way up to the dim garret, the scene of her memorable
punishment. A rusty hook projected from one of the joists a little
higher than a man's head. Something was hanging from it,--an old
garment, was it? She went bravely up and touched--a cold hand. She did
what most children of that age would do,--uttered a cry and ran
downstairs with all her might. She rushed out of the door and called to
the man Patrick, who was doing some work about the place. What could be
done was done, but it was too late.

Uncle Malachi had made away with himself. That was plain on the face of
thing. In due time the coroner's verdict settled it. It was not so
strange as it seemed; but it made a great talk in the village and all the
country round about. Everybody knew he had money enough, and yet he had
hanged himself for fear of starving to death.

For all that, he was found to have left a will, dated some years before,
leaving his property to his sister Silence, with the exception of a
certain moderate legacy to be paid in money to Myrtle Hazard when she
should arrive at the age of twenty years.

The household seemed more chilly than ever after this tragical event. Its
depressing influence followed the child to school, where she learned the
common branches of knowledge. It followed her to the Sabbath-day
catechisings, where she repeated the answers about the federal headship
of Adam, and her consequent personal responsibilities, and other
technicalities which are hardly milk for babes, perhaps as well as other
children, but without any very profound remorse for what she could not
help, so far as she understood the matter, any more than her sex or
stature, and with no very clear comprehension of the phrases which the
New England followers of the Westminster divines made a part of the
elementary instruction of young people.

At twelve years old she had grown tall and womanly enough to attract the
eyes of the youth and older boys, several of whom