ingly, but he took the
cup.

"Now, you hadn't ought to talk so," Fanny said. "You had ought to
think of your wife and children."

"My life is insured," said Joseph Atkins.

"We ain't got no money and no jewelry, and no silver to leave them
we love--all we've got to leave 'em is the price of our own lives,"
said Nahum Beals.

"I wish I had got my life insured," Andrew said.

"Don't talk so, Andrew," Fanny cried, with a shudder.

"My life is insured for two thousand dollars," Joe Atkins said, with
an odd sort of pride. "I had it done three years ago. My lungs was
sound as anybody's then, but that very next summer I worked up under
that tin roof, and came out as wet as if I'd been dipped in the
river, into an east wind, and got a chill. It was the only time I
ever struck luck--to get insured before that happened. Nobody'd look
at me now, and I dunno what they'd do. I 'ain't laid up a cent, I've
had so much sickness in my family."

"If you hadn't worked that summer in the annex under that tin roof,
you'd be as well as you ever was now," said Nahum Beals.

"I worked there 'longside of you that summer," said Andrew to Joe,
with bitter reminiscence. "We used to strip like a gang of convicts,
and we stood in pools of sweat. It was that awful hot summer, and
the room had only that one row of windows facing the east, and the
wind never that way."

"Not till I came out of the shop that night I took the chill," said
Joe.

Suddenly the young man, Nahum Beals, hit his knees a sounding slap,
which made Ellen, furtively and timidly attentive at her window,
jump. "It seems sometimes as if the Almighty himself was in league
with 'em," he shouted out, "but I tell you it won't last, it won't
last."

"I don't see much sign of any change for the better," Andrew said,
gloomily.

"I tell you, sir, it won't last," repeated Nahum Beals. "I tell you,
the Lord only raises 'em up higher and higher that He may dash 'em
lower when the time comes. The same earth is beneath the high places
of this life, and the lowly ones, and the law that governs 'em is
the same, and--the higher the place the longer the fall, and the
longer the fall the sorer the hurt." Nahum Beals sprang to his feet
with a strange abandon of self-consciousness and a fiery impetus for
one of his New England blood. He had a delicate, nervous face, like
a woman's, his blue eyes gleamed like blue flames under his overhang
of white forehead, he shook his head as if it w