on;"

and, before the verse was finished, her heart was at peace again.
"Doin to stay up here all 'lone, g'anma?" said wee Tillie in pitying
accents. "O no! I guess you and Nick will come up real often, won't
you?" "I dess so; but 'taint very pitty," said the little one, as she
trotted down-stairs again.

Meanwhile, John, as he followed the plow, was thinking of the five
dollars expended in repairing the room, and trying to persuade himself
that he was indeed a worthy son. "Five dollars! It aint every one that
would do as much for his mother as I do for mine," he soliloquized.
"Too old to go up-stairs! Oh well, when she once gets up she is more
out of the way; and she wants quiet, you know."

Be it known that John sometimes found it necessary to reason with
himself in order to assure his conscience that everything was as it
should be in her domain; and sometimes, as on this occasion, she asked
so many questions that he was obliged to talk the livelong afternoon.

He retired that night thinking, "Five dollars for grandma'm's room and
the mare lame in both forefeet!" But while these dismal thoughts
filled his mind, his body seemed to be very suddenly transported to
the kitchen below. He was not alone, however, for a woman was there
before him, walking the floor with a child in her arms. Back and forth
she paced, carefully holding the pale-faced boy in the same position
while he slept.

"Ruth," said a voice from an adjoining room, "that little chap will
wear you all out. Can't I take him a little while?" "O no," was the
reply. "He likes to have me carry him so, poor little fellow." "Ah,"
said John to himself, "that's the way mother carried me six nights,
when I got scalded so terribly." The scene changed, and he saw himself
again. A crushed foot this time, demanding his mother's untiring care.
Again and again incidents of his life were re-enacted before him, but
always with his mother there, comforting, working, watching, or
praying. Whether sick in body or in mind, he saw how, all through his
life, a mother's tender love had surrounded him. And then he stood
once more beside his father's death-bed, and heard again the solemn
charge: "Be kind to your mother, John, and make her old age pleasant.
She is all you've got now." With these words ringing in his ears John
Lyman awoke to find the perspiration standing on his forehead, and a
strange, weird sensation resting on him like a spell, which he tried
in vain to throw