ary.
The child'd been moanin' and tossin', and his muscles was twitchin',
and the fever jest as high as it could be. But about three o'clock he
got quiet and about half-past three I leaned over and counted his
breaths. He was breathin' slow and regular, and I touched his forehead
and found it was wet, and the fever was goin' away. I went over to
Mary, and says I, 'You go in the other room and lie down, Mary, the
fever's broke, and Harvey's goin' to git well.' She stared at me like
she couldn't take in what I was sayin'. Then her face begun to work
like a person's in a convulsion, and she jumped up and rushed out o'
the room, and the next minute she give a cry that I can hear yet. Then
she begun to sob, and I knew she was cryin' tears at last, and I set
by the child and cried with her.

"She wasn't able to be up for two or three days, and every little
while she'd burst out cryin'. Some folks said she was cryin' for joy
about the child gittin' well; and some said she was cryin' the tears
she ought to 'a' cried when Harvey was buried; but I knew she was
cryin' over all the sorrows of her married life. She told me
afterwards that she hadn't shed a tear for six or seven years. Says
she, 'I used to cry my eyes out nearly over the way things went, and
one day somethin' happened and I come near cryin'; but the children
was around and I didn't want them to see me; so I says to myself, "I
won't cry. What's the use wastin' tears over such things?" And from
that day,' says she, 'I got as hard as a stone, and it looks like I
was jest turnin' back to flesh and blood again.'

"There's only two ways o' takin' trouble, child; you can laugh over it
or you can cry over it. But you've got to do one or the other. The
Lord made some folks that can laugh away their troubles, and he made
tears for them that can't laugh, and human bein's can't harden
themselves into stone.

"I reckon, as Mary said, nobody on earth knew what she'd been through,
livin' with a man like Harvey. If he'd been an out-and-out miser, it
would 'a' been better for everybody concerned. But it looked like
Nature started out to make him a miser and then sp'iled the job, so's
he was neither one thing nor the other. The gold was there, and he
showed that to outsiders; and the clay was there, and he showed that
to Mary. And that's the strangest part of all to me. If he had enough
sense not to want his neighbors to know his meanness, it looks like he
ought to have had sense