would
indeed."

It is said that the sky has no color of its own--that the deep blue
we think so beautiful is only owing to the atmosphere through which we
view it. To Sarah this very slight expression of her lover's care
for her bore more weight than the most passionate protestations of
affection could have done to a colder nature, for it was colored by
the glowing tints of her own warm love; and when the two parted that
day she carried with her a sweet, satisfying sense of being beloved by
the "best man on the earth" even as she loved him; while he whistled
cheerily over his net-mending, thinking "what a sweet little thing it
was!" "how pretty its eyes were!" and "how kitten-like its ways!" and
only checked his whistling once in a while to wonder whether the day
would ever really come when "Sairy would feel herself better than
him," and to think it also a little hard that old Thomas Macy was "so
sot agin' the match" that he would give his daughter no portion but an
outfit of clothes and household linen. "He might jest's well's not,"
reasoned Jim to himself, "give us a little lift: I guess he would if
Sairy's own mother was alive; but them step-mothers never wants to
give nothin' ter the fust wives' childern." In which opinion Jim did
the second Mrs. Macy much injustice, for it was owing solely to her
influence that Sarah's father had consented to provide his daughter
with even a new dress in which to be married to "that big, lazy boy
o'old Steve Starbuck's."

Meantime, sad, gentle old Mrs. Starbuck had been turning over
many things in her mind. She felt her son's defects; she knew that
warm-hearted, imaginative Sarah Macy would be doing a foolish thing to
marry Jim--as foolish a thing as in her inmost heart she felt, rather
than acknowledged, that she herself had done when she married Jim's
father. But the mother-heart longed that her son should grow to be
what she desired (and what poor Sarah thought he already was), and she
hoped much from the elevating influence of so good a wife.

So, as she sat knitting, while Jim and his father sat, hats on heads
and pipes in mouths, mending their nets, old Mrs. Starbuck had "made a
plan." "Father," said, she at last, "I've be'n thinkin'--"

"Yay," replied the old man gruffly but not unkindly--"yay, I 'spect
so. Thee's pooty nigh allus a-thinkin' o' suthin. What is it neow?
Eout with it!"

"I've be'n thinkin' that Jim's all the child we've got--"

"Wal, yay. Hain't had n