Jim's sorrow.

"So much for _her_," he said, and turned to go and look for his mother.

CHAPTER V.

MOTHER AND SON.

He knew where he should find her. There was a little, low work-room
adjoining the kitchen that was his mother's sanctum. There stood her
work-basket--there were always piles and piles of work, begun or
finished; and there also her few books at hand, to be glanced into in
rare snatches of leisure in her busy life.

The old times New England house mother was not a mere unreflective drudge
of domestic toil. She was a reader and a thinker, keenly appreciative in
intellectual regions. The literature of that day in New England was
sparse; but whatever there was, whether in this country or in England,
that was noteworthy, was matter of keen interest, and Mrs. Pitkin's small
library was very dear to her. No nun in a convent under vows of
abstinence ever practiced more rigorous self-denial than she did in the
restraints and government of intellectual tastes and desires. Her son was
dear to her as the fulfillment and expression of her unsatisfied craving
for knowledge, the possessor of those fair fields of thought which duty
forbade her to explore.

James stood and looked in at the window, and saw her sorting and
arranging the family mending, busy over piles of stockings and shirts,
while on the table beside her lay her open Bible, and she was singing to
herself, in a low, sweet undertone, one of the favorite minor-keyed
melodies of those days:

"O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast
And our eternal home!"

An indescribable feeling, blended of pity and reverence, swelled in his
heart as he looked at her and marked the whitening hair, the thin worn
little hands so busy with their love work, and thought of all the bearing
and forbearing, the waiting, the watching, the long-suffering that had
made up her life for so many years. The very look of exquisite calm and
resolved strength in her patient eyes and in the gentle lines of her face
had something that seemed to him sad and awful--as the purely spiritual
always looks to the more animal nature. With his blood bounding and
tingling in his veins, his strong arms pulsating with life, and his heart
full of a man's vigor and resolve, his mother's life seemed to him to be
one of weariness and drudgery, of constant, unceasing self-abnegation.
Calm he knew she was, always sustained, never faltering; b