hen I should be grown quite an old man, and you an old woman, so
as not to be long apart, I might die happy enough in my bed, and leave
you all crying around me. A slate gravestone would suit me as well as
a marble one, with just my name and age, and a verse of a hymn, and
something to let people know that I lived an honest man and died a
Christian."

"There, now!" exclaimed the stranger; "it is our nature to desire a
monument, be it slate or marble, or a pillar of granite, or a glorious
memory in the universal heart of man."

"We're in a strange way to-night," said the wife, with tears in her
eyes. "They say it's a sign of something when folks' minds go
a-wandering so. Hark to the children!"

They listened accordingly. The younger children had been put to bed in
another room, but with an open door between; so that they could be
heard talking busily among themselves. One and all seemed to have
caught the infection from the fireside circle, and were outvying each
other in wild wishes and childish projects of what they would do when
they came to be men and women. At length a little boy, instead of
addressing his brothers and sisters, called out to his mother.

"I'll tell you what I wish, mother," cried he: "I want you and father
and grandma'm, and all of us, and the stranger too, to start right
away and go and take a drink out of the basin of the Flume."

Nobody could help laughing at the child's notion of leaving a warm bed
and dragging them from a cheerful fire to visit the basin of the
Flume--a brook which tumbles over the precipice deep within the Notch.

The boy had hardly spoken, when a wagon rattled along the road and
stopped a moment before the door. It appeared to contain two or three
men who were cheering their hearts with the rough chorus of a song
which resounded in broken notes between the cliffs, while the singers
hesitated whether to continue their journey or put up here for the
night.

"Father," said the girl, "they are calling you by name."

But the good man doubted whether they had really called him, and was
unwilling to show himself too solicitous of gain by inviting people to
patronize his house. He therefore did not hurry to the door, and, the
lash being soon applied, the travellers plunged into the Notch, still
singing and laughing, though their music and mirth came back drearily
from the heart of the mountain.

"There, mother!" cried the boy, again; "they'd have given us a ride to
the Flu