I knew him. He was set
on a son from his wedding day.

"The last time I saw him I joked him about that will, and told him he
would have to change it. He said no, it would stand that way. He said he
would get a son yet. Abraham was a hundred when Isaac was born, he
reminded me. Did Isom get him?"

"No," was the word that Uncle John's fingers found. He shook his head,
sadly.

"He worked and saved for him all his life," the old man wrote. "He set
his hope of that son above the Lord."

Uncle John was given to understand the importance of his information,
and that he might be called upon to give it over again in court.

He was greatly pleased with the prospect of publicly displaying his new
accomplishment. The lawyer gave him a printed good-bye, shook him by the
hand warmly, and left him poring over his ponderous book, his dumb lips
moving as his fingers spelled out the words.

They were near the end and the quieting of all this flurry that had
risen over the property of old Isom Chase, said the lawyer to himself as
he rode back to town to acquaint his client with her good fortune. There
was nothing in the way of her succession to the property now. The
probate court would, without question or doubt, throw out that
ridiculous document through which old Judge Little hoped to grease his
long wallet.

With Isom's will would disappear from the public notice the one
testimony of his only tender sentiment, his only human softness; a
sentiment and a softness which had been born of a desire and fostered by
a dream.

Strange that the hard old man should have held to that dream so
stubbornly and so long, striving to gain for it, hoarding to enrich it,
growing bitterer for its long coming, year by year. And at last he had
gone out in a flash, leaving this one speaking piece of evidence of
feeling and tenderness behind.

Perhaps Isom Chase would have been different, reflected the lawyer, if
fate had yielded him his desire and given him a son; perhaps it would
have softened his hand and mellowed his heart in his dealings with those
whom he touched; perhaps it would have lifted him above the narrow
strivings which had atrophied his virtues, and let the sunlight into the
dark places of his soul.

So communing with himself, he arrived in town. The people were coming
out of the court-house, the lowering gray clouds were settling mistily.
But it was a clearing day for his client; he hastened on to tell her of
the turn fortune had