e; he
just made me bring it. You can read it when you get well."

They hurried Mrs. McHurdie out, and when Jane Barclay went to sleep,
they found tears on her pillow, and in her hand the verses,--the
limping, awkward verses of an old man, whose music only echoed back
from the past. The nurses and the young doctor from Boston had a good
laugh at it. Each of the four stanzas began with two lines that asked:
"Oh, don't you remember the old river road, that ran through the
sweet-scented wood?" To them it was a curious parody on something old
and quaint that they had long since forgotten. But to the woman who
lay murmuring of other days, whose lips were parched for the waters of
brooks that had surrendered to the plough a score of years ago, the
halting verses of Watts McHurdie were laden with odours of grape
blossoms, of wild cucumbers and sumach, of elder blossoms, and the
fragrance of the crushed leaves of autumn. And the music of distant
ripples played in her feverish brain and the sobbing voice of the
turtle dove sang out of the past for her as she slept. All through the
day and the night and for many nights and days she whispered of the
trees and the running water and the wild grass and the birds.

And so one morning when it was still gray, she woke and said to John,
who bent over her, "Why, dear, we are almost home; there are the
lights across the river; just one more hill, dearie, and then--" And
then with the water prattling in her ears at the last ford she turned
to the wall and sank to rest.

Day after day, until the days and nights became a week and the week
repeated itself until nearly a month was gone, John Barclay, dry-eyed
and all but dumb, paced the terrace before his house by night, and by
day roamed through the noisy mill or wandered through his desolate
house, seeking peace that would not come to him. The whole foundation
of his scheme of life was crumbling beneath him. He had built
thirty-five years of his manhood upon the theory that the human brain
is the god of things as they are and as they must be. The structure of
his life was an imposing edifice, and men called it great and
successful. Yet as he walked his lonely way in those black days that
followed Jane's death, there came into his consciousness a strong,
overmastering conviction, which he dared not accept, that his house
was built on sand. For here were things outside of his plans, outside
of his very beliefs, coming into his life, bringing