with him so long and so doughtily that he had never been able
to form any anticipative picture of himself without her. Indeed, even
now it felt as if she had merely "gone off visitin'," and would be back
in time to knit him a pair of mitts before the cold weather came.

It was the odd idea about the world growing "yellow-lookin'"--sometimes
he said "red-lookin'" and at other times seemed not quite certain which
description conveyed the vague hue of his fancy--that appeared to be
pulling him to pieces, undermining him, more than any other influence.
Most people, however, were accustomed to consider the hallucination an
effect of Mother Dalton's removal and a presage of Old Dalton's own
passing.

This odd yellowness (or redness), as of grass over which chaff from the
threshing-mill has blown, lay across the old pasture on this afternoon
of his second century, as Old Dalton went to water the superannuated
black horse that whinnied at his approach.

"Ey, Charley," he said, reflectively, as he took the old beast by the
forelock to lead it up to the pump--"ey, Charley-boy"; then, as the
horse, diminishing the space between its forefoot and his heel with a
strange ease, almost trod on him--"ey, boy--steady there, now. Es yur
spavin not throublin' ye th' day, then? Ye walk that free. S-steady,
boy--ey!"

But Grace, the granddaughter, glancing across the pasture as she came
to the kitchen door to empty potato peelings, put it differently.

"See how hard it be's gettin' for grampa to get along, Jim," she said to
her husband, who sat mending a binder-canvas at the granary door. "I
never noticed it before, but that old lame Charley horse can keep right
up to him now."

Jim Nixon stuck his jack-knife into the step beside him, pushed a rivet
through canvas and fastening-strap, and remarked, casually: "He ought to
lay off now--too old to be chorin' around. Young Bill could do all the
work he's doin', after he comes home from school, evenings."

"He's not bin the same sence gramma died," Gracie Nixon observed,
turning indoors again. "It ain't likely we'll have him with us long now,
Jim."

The old man, coming into the house a little haltingly that evening,
stopped sharply as his granddaughter, with a discomposingly intent look,
asked, "Tired to-night, grampa?"

"Ey?" His mouth worked, and his eyes, the pupils standing aggressively
and stonily in the center of the whites, abetted the protest of the
indomitable old pioneer. "T