m sure. I s'pose
you're the young ladies that come here right after the Fourth o' July,
ain't you? I should be pleased to have you call and see the child'n if
you're over this way again. I heard 'em talk about you last time I was
over. Won't ye step into the house and see him? He looks real natural,"
she added. But we said, "No, thank you."

Leander told us he believed he wouldn't bother about the dory that day,
and he should be there at the house whenever we were ready. He evidently
considered it a piece of good luck that he had happened to arrive in
time for the funeral. We spoke to the man about the things we had
brought for the children, which seemed to delight him, poor soul, and we
felt sure he would be kind to them. His wife shouted to him from a
window of the house that he'd better not loiter round, or they wouldn't
be half ready when the folks began to come, and we said good by to him
and went away.

It was a beautiful morning, and we walked slowly along the shore to the
high rocks and the pitch-pine trees which we had seen before; the air
was deliciously fresh, and one could take long deep breaths of it. The
tide was coming in, and the spray dashed higher and higher. We climbed
about the rocks and went down in some of the deep cold clefts into which
the sun could seldom shine. We gathered some wild-flowers; bits of
pimpernel and one or two sprigs of fringed gentian which had bloomed
late in a sheltered place, and a pale little bouquet of asters. We sat
for a long time looking off to sea, and we could talk or think of almost
nothing beside what we had seen and heard at the farm-house. We said how
much we should like to go to that funeral, and we even made up our minds
to go back in season, but we gave up the idea: we had no right there,
and it would seem as if we were merely curious, and we were afraid our
presence would make the people ill at ease, the minister especially. It
would be an intrusion.

We spoke of the children, and tried to think what could be done for
them: we were afraid they would be told so many times that it was lucky
they did not have to go to the poor-house, and yet we could not help
pitying the hard-worked, discouraged woman whom we had seen, in spite of
her bitterness. Poor soul! she looked like a person to whom nobody had
ever been very kind, and for whom life had no pleasures: its sunshine
had never been warm enough to thaw the ice at her heart.

We remembered how we knocked at the