he high shelf and led the way.

"To think of your remembering our old cellar candlestick all these
years!" laughed the pleased woman, as she followed him down the steep
stairway, and then laughed still more at his delight in the familiar
look of the place.

"Unchanged as the pyramids!" he said. "I suppose those pound sweetings
that used to be in that farthest bin were eaten up months ago?"

It was plain to see that the household stores were waning low, as
befitted the time of year, but there was still enough in the old
cellar. Care and thrift and gratitude made the poor farmhouse a rich
place. This woman of real ability had spent her strength from youth to
age, and had lavished as much industry and power of organization in
her narrow sphere as would have made her famous in a wider one. Joseph
Laneway could not help sighing as he thought of it. How many things
this good friend had missed, and yet how much she had been able to win
that makes everywhere the very best of life! Poor and early widowed,
there must have been a constant battle with poverty on that stony
Harran farm, whose owners had been pitied even in his early boyhood,
when the best of farming life was none too easy. But Abby Hender had
always been one of the leaders of the town.

"Now, before we sit down again, I want you to step into my best room.
Perhaps you won't have time in the morning, and I've got something to
show you," she said persuasively.

It was a plain, old-fashioned best room, with a look of pleasantness
in spite of the spring chill and the stiffness of the best chairs.
They lingered before the picture of Mrs. Hender's soldier son, a poor
work of a poorer artist in crayons, but the spirit of the young face
shone out appealingly. Then they crossed the room and stood before
some bookshelves, and Abby Hender's face brightened into a beaming
smile of triumph.

"You didn't expect we should have all those books, now, did you, Joe
Laneway?" she asked.

He shook his head soberly, and leaned forward to read the titles.
There were no very new ones, as if times had been hard of late; almost
every volume was either history, or biography, or travel. Their owner
had reached out of her own narrow boundaries into other lives and into
far countries. He recognized with gratitude two or three congressional
books that he had sent her when he first went to Washington, and there
was a life of himself, written from a partisan point of view, and
issued in one