and donned his little clean, coarse shirt and
his poor best garments. Then he came down with the black silk
neckerchief, and Paulina Maria tied it around his boyish neck.

"His father thought so much of that neckerchief," said Mrs. Edwards,
catching her breath. "It was 'most the only thing he bought for
himself for ten year that he didn't actually need."

"Jerome is the one to have it," said Paulina Maria, and she made the
black silk knot tight and firm.

An hour before the time set for the funeral Ann Edwards was all
dressed and ready. They had drawn her chair into the front parlor,
and there she sat in state. She wore the borrowed black bonnet and
veil. The decent black shawl and gown were her own. The doctor's wife
had sent over some black silk gloves, and she wore them. They were
much too large. Ann crossed her tiny hands, wrinkled over with the
black silk, with long, empty black silk fingers dangling in her lap,
over a fine white linen handkerchief. She had laid her gloved hands
over the handkerchief with a gesture full of resolution. "I sha'n't
give way," she said to Paulina Maria. That meant that, although she
took the handkerchief in obedience to custom, it would not be used to
dry the tears of affliction.

Ann's face, through the black gloom of her crape veil, revealed only
the hard lines of resolution about her mouth and the red stain of
tears about her eyes. She held now her emotions in check like a vise.

Jerome and poor little Elmira, whom Paulina Maria had dressed in a
little black Canton-crape shawl of her own, sat on either side.
Elmira wept now and then, trying to stifle her sobs, but Jerome sat
as immovable as his mother.

The funeral guests arrived, and seated themselves solemnly in the
rows of chairs which had been borrowed from the neighbors. Adoniram
Judd and Ozias Lamb had carried chairs for a good part of the
forenoon. Nearly all the village people came; the strange
circumstances of this funeral, wherein there was no dead man to carry
solemnly in the midst of a long black procession to his grave, had
attracted many. Then, too, Abel Edwards had been known to them all
since his childhood, and well liked in the main, although the hard
grind of his daily life had of late years isolated him from his old
mates.

Men sat there with stiff bowed heads, and glances of solemn
furtiveness at new-comers, who had played with Abel in his boyhood,
and to whom those old memories were more real than those