ght before the funeral, walked slowly and thoughtfully down the
path together. They looked over every step of the way with to-morrow's
slow and toilsome march in their minds. When they came to the turn by
Pelatiah's mound they paused.

"We can't never get him round that bend," said one. "That ain't no way
to start down the hill. Best is I come here first thing in the morning
and cut a way through this bull-brier straight across the angle, then we
can see ahead where we're going. Put them two light men behind, and you
and me at the head, and we can manage it. My! what a man _he_ was,
though! Why, I seen him take the head of a coffin all by himself once."

This man was a near neighbor of the Turnbulls, for now they had a number
of neighbors; Reuben Levi Dodd had been selling small farms off his big
farm--somehow he had never made the big farm a success. There are many
services of men to man that country neighbors make little of, though to
the dwellers in great cities they might seem strange burdens. At five
o'clock the next morning Warren Freeman, the pall-bearer, went out and
mowed and hacked a path through the tangled field from midway of old
Pelatiah's trail down to a shortcut made by the doctor's charity boy,
who was to-day a Judge. This Judge came out of the silent house,
released by the waking hour, from his vigil with the dead. He watched
his fellow pall-bearer at work.

[Illustration: "I USED TO GO DOWN THAT PATH ON THE DEAD RUN"]

"I used to go down that path on the dead run twenty years ago," said he,
"when I was working for Dr. Van Wagener and he used to send me up here
gathering herbs."

"You'll go down it on the dead walk to-morrow, Jedge," said the other,
pausing in his work, "and you want to step mighty careful, or one fun'l
will breed another."

Life, death, wedlock, the lingering of lovers, the waywardness of
childish feet, the tread of weary toil, the slow, swaying walk of the
mother, with her babe in her arms, the measured steps of the bearer of
the dead, the light march of youth and strength and health--all, all
have helped to beat out the strange, wandering line of the old path; and
to me, who love to find and to tread its turns, the current of their
human life flows still along its course, in the dim spaces under the
trees, or out where the sunshine and the wind are at play upon the
broad, bright meadows.

THE LOST CHILD

The best of life in a great city is that it breeds a broad and