hame to them!"

The mention of the children awoke to life J.M.'s old punctilious habits.
He tried to sit up. "But you have so little space for all your family--you
should not have taken me in; where can the children sleep?"

Mrs. McCartey pushed him back on the pillow with an affectionate firmness
born of "the bringin' up of sivin." "Now lay still, Uncle Jerry, and kape
yourself cool." The name slipped out unnoticed in her hospitable fervor
"Wasn't it the least we could do when 'twas our own Mike's ball that came
near killin' you? An' the children--the boys, that is, that this is their
room--isn't it out in the barn they're sleepin' on the hay? An' that
pleased with it. Pat and I were thinkin' that now was a good chance to
teach them to give up things--when you've no old folks about you, the
children are so apt to grow up selfish-like--but they think the barn's
better nor the house, bless them, so don't _you_ worry."

She pulled the bedclothes straight (J.M. noticed that they were quite
clean), settled the pillow, and drew down the shade. "Now thin, you've
talked enough," she said. "Take a sup of sleep for a while." And to
J.M.'s feeble surprise he found himself doing exactly as he was told,
dozing off with a curious weak-headed feeling of comfort.

He came to his strength slowly, the doctor forbidding him to think of
taking a journey for a month at least. Indeed, J.M., thinking of his
isolated tower-rooms in the deserted college town, was in no haste to
leave Mrs. McCartey's kindly, dictatorial care. He had been very sick
indeed, the doctor told him seriously, and he felt it in the trembling
weakness of his first attempts at sitting up, and in the blank vacancy of
his mind.

At first he could not seem to remember for more than an instant at a time
how he came to be there, and later, as his capacity for thought came back,
he found his surroundings grown insensibly familiar to him. He felt
himself somehow to have slipped so completely into the inside of things
that it was impossible to recover the remote, hostile point of view which
had been his as he had looked over the gate a fortnight ago. For instance,
knowing now, not only that the children's faces were scrubbed to a
polished redness every morning, but being: cognizant through his window of
most of the palpably unavoidable accidents of play which made them dirty
half an hour later, he would have resented as unreasonable intolerance any
undue emphasis on this pha