side her thin cheeks and gathered into a bunch
at the back of her shapely little head; her face was oval, with regular
features and pale olive complexion; serious lips, closed in pensive
thought, and soft, dark-brown eyes, full of tender affection and
sorrowful memories, and too often cast down in meditation beneath the
heavy shadows of their long, thick eyelashes, completed the melancholy
beauty of a countenance not often seen among the hard-working children
of toil.

Marah Rocke was a very hard-working woman, sewing all day long and
knitting through the twilight, and then again resuming her needle by
candle-light and sewing until midnight--and yet Marah Rocke made but a
poor and precarious living for herself and son. Needlework, so ill-paid
in large cities, is even worse paid in the country towns, and, though
the cottage hearth was never cold, the widow's meals were often scant.
Lately her son, Traverse, who occasionally earned a trifle of money by
doing "with all his might whatever his hand could find to do," had been
engaged by a grocer in the town to deliver his goods to his customers
during the illness of the regular porter; for which, as he was only a
substitute, he received the very moderate sum of twenty-five cents a
day.

This occupation took Traverse from home at daybreak in the morning, and
kept him absent until eight o'clock at night. Nevertheless, the widow
always gave him a hot breakfast before he went out in the morning and
kept a comfortable supper waiting for him at night.

It was during this last social meal that the youth would tell his mother
all that had occurred in his world outside the home that day, and all
that he expected to come to pass the next, for Traverse was wonderfully
hopeful and sanguine.

And after supper the evening was generally spent by Traverse in hard
study beside his mother's sewing-stand.

Upon this evening, when the widow sat waiting for her son, he seemed to
be detained longer than usual. She almost feared that the biscuits would
be burned, or, if taken from the oven, be cold before he would come to
enjoy them; but, just as she had looked for the twentieth time at the
little black walnut clock that stood between those old plated
candlesticks on the mantelpiece, the sound of quick, light, joyous
footsteps was heard resounding along the stony street, the gate was
opened, a hand laid upon the door-latch, and the next instant entered a
youth some seventeen years of age, c