to a vandoo down
at old Mis' Walton Peters's after she died, so Mis' Wallis said. I
guess I'll speak to her, and see if she wants every thing sold that's
here."

There was a very great pathos to me about this old home. It must have
been a hard place to get a living in, both for men and women, with its
wretched farming-land, and the house itself so cold and thin and worn
out. I could understand that the son was in a hurry to get his mother
away from it. I was sure that the boyhood he had spent there must have
been uncomfortable, and that he did not look back to it with much
pleasure. There is an immense contrast between even a moderately
comfortable city house and such a place as this. No wonder that he
remembered the bitter cold mornings, the frost and chill, and the
dark, and the hard work, and wished his mother to leave them all
behind, as he had done! He did not care for the few plain bits of
furniture; why should he? and he had been away so long, that he had
lost his interest in the neighbors. Perhaps this might come back to
him again as he grew older; but now he moved about among them, in his
handsome but somewhat flashy clothes, with a look that told me he felt
conscious of his superior station in life. I did not altogether like
his looks, though somebody said admiringly, as he went by, "They say
he's worth as much as thirty thousand dollars a'ready. He's smart as a
whip." But, while I did not wonder at the son's wishing his mother to
go away, I also did not wonder at her being unwilling to leave the
dull little house where she had spent so much of her life. I was
afraid no other house in the world would ever seem like home to her:
she was a part of the old place; she had worn the doors smooth by the
touch of her hands, and she had scrubbed the floors, and walked over
them, until the knots stood up high in the pine boards. The old clock
had been unscrewed from the wall, and stood on a table; and when I
heard its loud and anxious tick, my first thought was one of pity for
the poor thing, for fear it might be homesick, like its mistress. When
I went out again, I was very sorry for old Mrs. Wallis; she looked so
worried and excited, and as if this new turn of affairs in her life
was too strange and unnatural; it bewildered her, and she could not
understand it; she only knew every thing was going to be different.

Georgie was by himself, as usual, looking grave and intent. He had
gone aloft on the wheel of a clumsy