of the last
ten years. Abel Edwards, in the absence both of his living soul and
his dead body, was present in the minds of many as a sturdy,
light-hearted boy.

The people of Upham Corners assembled there together, dressed in
their best, displaying their most staid and decorous demeanor, showed
their fortunes in life plainly enough. Generally speaking, they were
a poor and hard-working folk--poorer and harder working than the
average people in villages. Upham Corners, from its hilly site,
freely intersected with rock ledges, was not well calculated for
profitable farming. The farms therein were mortgaged, and scarcely
fed their tillers. The water privileges were good and mills might
have flourished, but the greater markets were too far away, and few
workmen could be employed.

Most of the women at poor Abel Edwards's funeral were worn and old
before their prime, their mouths sunken, wearing old women's caps
over their locks at thirty. Their decent best gowns showed that
piteous conservation of poverty more painful almost than squalor.

The men were bent and gray with the unseen, but no less tangible,
burdens of life. Scarcely one there but bore, as poor Abel Edwards
had borne, a mortgage among them. It was a strange thing that
although all of the customary mournful accessories of a funeral were
wanting, although no black coffin with its silent occupant stood in
their midst, and no hearse waited at the door, yet that mortgage of
Abel Edwards's--that burden, like poor Christian's, although not of
sin, but misfortune, which had doubled him to the dust--seemed still
to be present.

The people had the thought of it ever in their minds. They looked at
Ann Edwards and her children, and seemed to see in truth the mortgage
bearing down upon them, like a very shadow of death.

They looked across at Doctor Seth Prescott furtively, as if he might
perchance read their thoughts, and wondered if he would foreclose.

Doctor Prescott, in his broadcloth surtout, with his black satin
stock muffling richly his stately neck, sat in the room with the
mourners, directly opposite the Edwards family. His wife was beside
him. She was a handsome woman, taller and larger than her husband,
with a face of gentlest serenity set in shining bands of auburn hair.
Mrs. Doctor Prescott looked like an empress among the other women,
with her purple velvet pelisse sweeping around her in massive folds,
and her purple velvet bonnet with a long ostrich