e with great
appetites. Our work had been resumed around the stove, and all was calm
and comfortable within the little sitting-room, though without the wind
had risen higher and the snow fell faster and faster, when the door was
suddenly opened, and as suddenly shut, by the wife of a neighbor, who,
with hands clasped together, as if overcome by some terrible grief,
rushed toward where my mother was sitting, and exclaimed,--

"Oh, Mrs. Lacey! how can I tell you?"

"What is it?" eagerly inquired my mother, starting from her seat, and
casting from her the work on which she had been engaged. "What is it?
Speak! What has happened?" she cried, wild at the woman's apparent
inability to communicate the tidings she had evidently come to relate.

Regaining her composure in some measure, the latter, covering her face
with her hands, and bursting into tears, sobbed out,--

"He's drowned!"

"Oh! which of them?" shrieked my mother, wringing her hands, and every
vestige of color in her cheeks supplanted by a pallor so frightful that
it struck dismay to my heart.

A mysterious instinct had warned her, the moment the woman spoke the
first words, that some calamity had overtaken us.

"Which of them?" she repeated, with frantic impetuosity, "Is it my
husband or my son? Speak! speak! My heart breaks!"

"Your husband, Mrs. Lacey," the woman replied; and as if relieved from
the crushing burden she had thus transferred from her own spirit to
ours, she sank back exhausted into a chair.

"Oh! when, where, and how?" demanded my mother. "Are you sure it is
true? Who brought the news?"

"Your own son, Ma'am; he sent me here to tell you," answered the woman.

The door opened at the moment, and Fred, accompanied by several of the
neighbors, entered the room. Crying as if his heart would break, he
called out,--

"Oh, mother! it's too true,--father is gone!"

This confirmation of the withering blow broke her down. I saw that she
was tottering to a fall, and threw my arms round her just in time to
prevent it. We laid her on the settee, insensible to everything about
her.

As the news of our great bereavement spread, the neighbors crowded in,
offering their sympathy and aid. It was very kind of them, but, alas!
could do nothing towards lightening its weight. The story of how my dear
father came to his untimely end was at length related to us. He had gone
out upon the river in a boat from which a seine was being cast, and by
accident, n