door and called loudly, but there
had been no answer, and we wondered how we should have felt if we had
gone farther into the room and had found the dead man in his coffin, all
alone in the house. We thought of our first visit, and what he had said
to us, and we wished we had come again sooner, for we might have helped
them so much more if we had only known.

"What a pitiful ending it is," said Kate. "Do you realize that the
family is broken up, and the children are to be half strangers to each
other? Did you not notice that they seemed very fond of each other when
we saw them in the summer? There was not half the roughness and apparent
carelessness of one another which one so often sees in the country.
Theirs was such a little world; one can understand how, when the man's
wife died, he was bewildered and discouraged, utterly at a loss. The
thoughts of winter, and of the little children, and of the struggles he
had already come through against poverty and disappointment were
terrible thoughts; and like a boat adrift at sea, the waves of his
misery brought him in against the rocks, and his simple life was
wrecked."

"I suppose his grandest hopes and wishes would have been realized in a
good farm and a thousand or two dollars in safe keeping," said I. "Do
you remember that merry little song in 'As You Like It'?

'Who doth ambition shun
And loves to live i' the sun,
Seeking the food he eats,
And pleased with what he gets';
and
'Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.'

That is all he lived for, his literal daily bread. I suppose what would
be prosperity to him would be miserably insufficient for some other
people. I wonder how we can help being conscious, in the midst of our
comforts and pleasures, of the lives which are being starved to death in
more ways than one."

"I suppose one thinks more about these things as one grows older," said
Kate, thoughtfully. "How seldom life in this world seems to be a
success! Among rich or poor only here and there one touches
satisfaction, though the one who seems to have made an utter failure may
really be the greatest conqueror. And, Helen, I find that I understand
better and better how unsatisfactory, how purposeless and disastrous,
any life must be which is not a Christian life! It is like being always
in the dark, and wandering one knows not where, if one is not learning
more and more what it is to have a friendship w