r of the sewing-circle, at which function she was now
assisting with much spirit.

Mrs. Lapham accepted this tribute to her many trials with becoming
modesty. She was a dull, colourless woman whose sole distinction lay
in the visitations of affliction, and it is not too much to affirm
that she was proud of them. She was sewing, not too rapidly, on a very
long seam, which occupation was typical of her course of life. She
sighed heavily in response to her neighbour's words of sympathy, and
said:

"It did seem hard that it should have been Dan, just as he was
beginning to be a help to his uncle, and all. But I s'pose we'd ought
to have been prepared for it."

"There's been quite a pause in the death-roll," the Widow Criswell
observed. She was engaged in sewing a button on a boy's jacket with a
black thread.

"How long is it since Eliza went?" asked Miss Louisa Bailey, pursuing
the widow's train of thought.

"Seven years this month. She began to cough at Christmas, and by
Washington's Birthday she was in her grave."

"And Jane? They didn't go very far apart, did they?"

"No, Jane died eleven months before Eliza; and their mother went three
years before that, and their father when Dan was a baby; that's goin'
on sixteen years."

"_Well_, you _have_ had a hard time, I _will_ say!" exclaimed Mrs.
Dodge. "Your Martha losing her little girl, and John's wife breaking
her collar-bone, and all, and now _this_ to be gone through with! I
_should_ think you'd feel _discouraged_!"

"I do; real discouraged. But I s'pose it's no more than I'd ought to
expect, with such an inheritance."

"Have there been many cases of lung-trouble on your side of the
family, Mrs. Lapham?" Miss Bailey inquired with respectful interest.

"No; Sister Fitch was the first case."

For a few seconds, conversation languished, and only the snip of Mrs.
Royce's scissors could be heard, and the soft rustle of cotton cloth.
The sewing-circle was going on in the church vestry where there was a
faint odour from the kerosene lamps, which had just been lighted. The
Widow Criswell was the first to break the silence.

"Polly ain't showed no symptoms yet, has she?" she asked, testing one
of the buttons as if sceptical of her thread.

"Well, no; not yet. But then Dan seemed as smart as anybody six months
ago, and just look at him to-day!"

The mental eyes of a score of women were turned upon Dan, as he was
daily seen, round-shouldered and hollow-chested,