ne of the church pew-cushions.

"Will you rise?" he asked.

He did not bring the cushion to where I was; he carried it around and
spread it in a vacant spot between two graves, the place left beside
my mother for my precious father's white hairs to be laid in. Having
deposited it there, he looked at me, evidently expecting that I would
avail myself of his kindness. I wanted to refuse. I felt perfectly
comfortable where I was. I should have done so, had not my intention
been intercepted by a shaft of expression that crossed my vein of
humor unexpectedly. It was only a look from out of his eyes. They were
absolutely colorless,--not white, not black, but a strange mingling of
all hues made them everything to my view,--and yet so full of coloring
that no one ray came shining out and said, "I'm blue, or black, or
gray;" but something said, if not the mandate of color, "Obey!"

I did.

"Sacrilege!" I said. "It is a place for worship."

"Whose grave is this?" Mr. Axtell asked, as he bent down and laid his
hand upon the sod. It was upon the one next beyond my mother's; between
the two it was that he had placed the cushion.

"The head-stone is just there. You can read, can you not?" I asked, with
a spice of malice, because for the second time this barbaric gentleman
had commanded me to obey.

He lifted himself up, leaned against the towering family-monument, and
slowly said,--

"Miss Percival, it is very hard for an Axtell to forgive."

I thought of the face in the Upper Country, and asked,--

"Why?"

"Because the Creator has almost deprived them of forgiving power. Don't
tempt one of them to sin by giving occasion for the exercise of that
wherein they mourn at being deficient."

I pulled dead grassy fibres again, and said nothing.

The second time he bent to the mound of earth, and said,--

"Please tell me now, Miss Anna, whose grave this is;" and there were
tears in his eyes that made them for the moment grandly brown.

"Truly, Mr. Axtell, I do not know. I've been so busy with the living that
I've not thought much of this place. It long since all these died, you
know;" and I looked about upon the little village closed in by the iron
railing. "I do not know that I can tell you one, save my mother's, here.
I remember her; the others I cannot."

I arose to walk around to the headstone and see.

"No," he said. "Will you listen to me a little while?"

"If you'll sing for me."

"Sing for you?"--and there was