t
whistling down the road, waving his stick at old Mosey as he disappeared
among the sycamores in the wash. The old man gathered the dishes into a
rusty pan, and scalded them with boiling water from the kettle.

"I believe I'll do it," he said, as he fished the hot saucers out by
their edges and turned them down on the table; "it can't do no harm to
write to her, no way."

II

Mrs. Moxom put on her slat sunbonnet, took a tin pan from the pantry
shelf, and hurried across the kitchen toward the door. Her
daughter-in-law looked up from the corner where she was kneading bread.
She was a short, plump woman, and all of her convexities seemed
emphasized by flour. She put up the back of her hand to adjust a
loosened lock of hair, and added another high light to her forehead.

"Where you going, mother?" she called anxiously.

The old woman did not turn her head.

"Oh, just out to see how the lettuce is coming on. I had a notion I'd
like some for dinner, wilted with ham gravy."

"Can't one of the children get it?"

There was no response. Mrs. Weaver turned back to her bread.

"Your grandmother seems kind of fidgety this morning," she fretted to
her eldest daughter, who was decorating the cupboard shelves with tissue
paper of an enervating magenta hue, and indulging at intervals in vocal
reminiscences of a ship that never returned.

"Oh, well, mother," said that young person comfortably, "let her alone.
I think we all tag her too much. I hate to be tagged myself."

"Well, I'm sure I don't want to tag her, Ethel; I just don't want her to
overdo."

Mrs. Weaver spoke in a tone of mingled injury and self-justification.

"Oh, well, mother, she isn't likely to put her shoulder out of joint
pulling a few heads of lettuce."

The girl broke out again into cheerful interrogations concerning the
disaster at sea:--

"Did she never_r_ re_tur_ren?
No, she never_r_ re_tur_rened."

Mrs. Weaver gave a little sigh, as if she feared her daughter's words
might prove prophetic, and buried her plump fists in the puffy dough.

Old Mrs. Moxom turned when she reached the garden gate and glanced back
at the house. Then she clasped the pan to her breast and skurried along
the fence toward the orchard. Once under the trees, she did not look
behind her, but went rapidly toward the field where she knew her son was
plowing. The reflection of the sun on the tin pan made him look up, and
when he saw her he stopped his team. She came ac