of this," I said, holding the glass
to his lips.

"What's it for?" he asked.

"It's a heart stimulant," I explained. "The doctor
said if we could get you through to-night you have a
good chance."

His face drew together in grotesque lines of anxiety. "Little Frank
worse?"

"Oh, no, he's doing finely."

"Susie all right?"

"Why, yes," I said wonderingly.

"Nothing the matter with her other boy?"

"Why, no, no," I told him. "Everybody's all right Here, just take this
down."

He turned away his head on the pillow and murmured something I did not
catch. When I asked him what he said, he smiled feebly as in deprecation
of his well-known ridiculous ways. "I'm just as much obliged to you," he
said, "but if everybody's all right, I guess I won't have any medicine."
He looked at me earnestly. "I'm--I'm real tired," he said.

It came out in one great breath--apparently his last, for he did not move
after that, and his ugly, slack-mouthed face was at once quite still. Its
expression made me think of the time I had seen it as a child, by
lantern-light, as he looked down at the new-born lamb on his breast.

IN NEW NEW ENGLAND

I.

This is a true story, for I have heard it ever so many times from my
grandmother. She heard it from her grandmother, who told it about her own
mother; and it began and ended right here in our village of Hillsboro,
Vermont, in 1762.

Probably you think at once of the particular New England old town you
know, and imagine Hillsboro of that date as an elm-shaded, well-kept
street, with big, white, green-shuttered houses, full of shining mahogany
furniture and quaint old silver. But my grandmother gives an entirely
different picture of old times in this corner of Vermont. Conditions here,
at that time, were more as they had been in Connecticut and Massachusetts
a hundred and forty years before. Indeed, the Pilgrim Fathers endured no
more hardships as pioneers in a wild, new country than did the first
Vermonters.

Hillsboro had been settled only about fifteen years before this story
begins, and the people had had to make for themselves whatever they
possessed, since there was no way to reach our dark, narrow valley except
by horseback over the ridge of the Green Mountains. There were no fine
houses, because there was no sawmill. There were little, low log cabins of
two rooms each, and the furniture, such as it was, was rough-hewn out of
native woods. Our great-grandfathers were too