irit roam. Mother Spurlock had been the gayest young matron in
Goodloets, living in the great old Spurlock home with handsome,
rollicking young George Spurlock for a husband, and three babies around
her knees, and in one short year she had been left with only one large
and three tiny graves out in the placid home of the dead, beyond the
river bend. The babies had been taken by that relentless child foe,
diphtheria, and young George, reckless with grief, had let a half-broken
horse break his neck. The young woman, aged by her grief, had sold the
great house to the next of kin and moved down into an old brick cottage
that sat "beside the road" in a gnarled old apple orchard, and had
become the "friend to man." Through the orchard and past the door of the
Little House ran the path that led from the Settlement to the Town, and
through her heart and hands flowed most of the love and charity that
bound the rich and poor, brother to brother. Mother Spurlock was never
without a bundle in which she carried labor of the poor sold for the
gold of the rich, or gifts from the rich back to the needy. I thought of
all the long years of service in the vineyard into which her tragedy had
thrown her, and I bent and picked up the bundle at our feet and held it
with reverent hands.

"Just a few baby things that Nellie Morgan gave me to fix up a poor
little Mother Only in the village," she came back from her reverie to
say cheerfully, as she saw me with the bundle in my hand. Mother
Spurlock always refers to the children without the sanction of the law
for their birth as the Mother Onlies, and somehow, when she speaks it,
the name carries a world of tenderness into the heart of the hearer.

"Whose now?" I asked her gently, because in a way Mother Spurlock and I
bore one another's burdens of spirit.

"Hattie Garrett's, and it's a week old now. It is one of the saddest
things that ever happened in the village, and we none of us understand.
You remember, she taught the district school down in the Settlement."

"As none of us understood about Martha Ensley. Is that all a mystery
still?" I asked, and I stroked the bundle of tiny garments.

"Yes, and now she's gone nobody knows where, day before yesterday.
Jacob, her father, was rough and violent with her, but only from grief,
and she forgave all that. I'm troubled sorely, for she is gentle, and
not one to fight the world alone. She must have gone to the city, the
good Lord help her!"

"He