ty, ain't they?" said Maria. "They have drank up a whole saucer of
milk. 'Most starved. I s'pose."

Johnny gathered up the two forlorn kittens and sat down in a kitchen
chair, with one on each shoulder, hard, boyish cheeks pressed against
furry, purring sides, and the little fighting Cock of the Walk felt his
heart glad and tender with the love of the strong for the weak.

DANIEL AND LITTLE DAN'L

THE Wise homestead dated back more than a century, yet it had nothing
imposing about it except its site. It was a simple, glaringly white
cottage. There was a center front door with two windows on each side;
there was a low slant of roof, pierced by unpicturesque dormers. On
the left of the house was an ell, which had formerly been used as a
shoemaker's shop, but now served as a kitchen. In the low attic of the
ell was stored the shoemaker's bench, whereon David Wise's grandfather
had sat for nearly eighty years of working days; after him his eldest
son, Daniel's father, had occupied the same hollow seat of patient toil.
Daniel had sat there for twenty-odd years, then had suddenly realized
both the lack of necessity and the lack of customers, since the
great shoe-plant had been built down in the village. Then Daniel had
retired--although he did not use that expression. Daniel said to his
friends and his niece Dora that he had "quit work." But he told himself,
without the least bitterness, that work had quit him.

After Daniel had retired, his one physiological peculiarity assumed
enormous proportions. It had always been with him, but steady work had
held it, to a great extent, at bay. Daniel was a moral coward before
physical conditions. He was as one who suffers, not so much from agony
of the flesh as from agony of the mind induced thereby. Daniel was a
coward before one of the simplest, most inevitable happenings of earthly
life. He was a coward before summer heat. All winter he dreaded summer.
Summer poisoned the spring for him. Only during the autumn did he
experience anything of peace. Summer was then over, and between him and
another summer stretched the blessed perspective of winter. Then Daniel
Wise drew a long breath and looked about him, and spelled out the beauty
of the earth in his simple primer of understanding. Daniel had in his
garden behind the house a prolific grape-vine. He ate the grapes, full
of the savor of the dead summer, with the gusto of a poet who can at
last enjoy triumph over his enemy.