alls of friendship, and even by the inexorable
demands of his own system, he had shut his ears and refused, as if
putting behind his back some tempter of the soul. Friends had said to
him: "John, you are killing yourself!" or "John, you are working too
hard and too steadily! Some day you will pay for all this." And one day
a blunt-spoken rustic neighbor, observing him at his toil early and
late, had said: "John Crawford, you are a fool! You do too much work!
You have a fine constitution, and think that you can take liberties with
it; but some day it will pay you, mark my words! You will find yourself,
one fine morning, doubled up like an old horse that has been
over-driven; and that will be the end of _you_! But go on, if you like
it!"

John Crawford _had_ "gone on." He had married very late in life,
principally on account of his belief that no man should marry until he
had done his life-work and placed himself beyond anxiety on the score of
property. When the day of his marriage came, after an engagement of
nearly ten years, people had long been saying that the woman of his
choice, his "Mary," had already worried away the best part of her life
in anxiety for him and in fears for the final prevention of their union.
Then, when the marriage was finally consummated and those who loved him
best hoped that he would relax in his life-wearing toil, he had merely
commenced to work the harder, because a married man needed to be better
circumstanced than a single one! And when, five or six years after his
marriage, and after giving birth to his one daughter and only child,
Mary, his wife died, he had gone to work still harder, it seemed, as the
only means of forgetting his bereavement! Rain or shine--early and
late--year after year, he had labored on, enriching his lands and
increasing his outbuildings, adding new acres and putting a few more
thousands to those already out at interest on good bond-and-mortgage.

One day--some two years before the date of this story--the crash had
come. The "old horse" had "doubled up." John Crawford had not come down
to breakfast at his usual time, and those who went up to look after him
had first discovered what ruin could do in a single night. The hale man
of the night before had become a partial paralytic, helpless from that
day forward--never again to lift hand in any employment, and scarcely
permitted brain enough to realize all that he had won and all that he
had lost. Gradually, afterwar