questioned

the goodness of the angels in taking him to her. Altogether there was nothing sad about it, except that everyone would miss old Mr. Hopkins for a while.

But this funeral to-day would be different. There were children at Brown’s—some of them just babies. Mrs. Brown couldn’t be much older than his mother. People said she had consumption, and when Billy had called to ask hands to the threshing last fall he had seen her at the pump, and she looked so white and thin she had almost frightened him. When he asked if he could carry the water for her she couldn’t answer—just leaned on the pump and coughed and coughed. He had seen her helping her husband plant potatoes once too. She hadn’t looked so bad then, but that was a year ago. Well, she would be through now. He had heard his grandmother say once that there were “a thousand things worse than death.” Maybe it was true. He climbed stiffly down from the gate post and walked reflectively to the house.

Long before the hour, the Brown house was filled with people; others gathered in little knots about the yard. Men exchanged views of the crop prospects, and occasionally when the drone of the bees in the lilacs and the creak of the buggies in the lane ceased for a moment, a remark like “That sod field ought to go fifty bushel to the acre,” sounded irrelevantly across the

yard. The women talked only of the deceased—when she had taken the turn, how she had said good-bye to the children the last night and sent them off to bed with a smile, then gone completely out of her mind in the bitterness of it—and how hard it was going to be for Jim. He was just getting ready to build a barn too; a pile of gravel a few yards from the back door was evidence of its progress—it seemed hard, just when they were getting along so well. And he had done all for her that a man could do. He had even had her to the sanitarium; but it was no use—once you got consumption there was just one thing to wait for. They reviewed the lives and deaths of her ancestors to see where she had inherited it, but could find no trace of the trouble for three generations back. She had always been so smart and strong, too. Why, when she was first married she could do as much as any other two women in the neighborhood.

The old doctor, friend and terror of the community, stopped to shake hands with a strong, honest-looking young fellow leaning against the fence.

“Pretty hard, eh?” he remarked nodding towards the house.

“Sure is. It’s a bad thing to let get hold of you. I know from experience. I worked in the city for a couple of years in a wholesale house once. Got a notion I didn’t like farming, you

know, like lots of other young fellows do—and I believe if I’d stayed there a year longer, cooped up in a cage breathing the dust and smoke of the place, I’d never got back at all. But I got out of it in time. I’m out in the field now ten hours a day. I eat like a horse and I’ll bet you couldn’t find a spot on my lungs with the point of a needle. I’m always glad I was able to bring Hazel out to the farm. She gets tired of it sometimes, after always being in a store, but I tell her it’s the healthiest place this side of Switzerland—all the fresh air there is clean off the fields, and the best place in the world to bring up children.”

“Isn’t turning out very well for these kids here.”

“Losing their mother?—No.”

“There’s always that chance.”

“There is anywhere. What do you mean?”

“Just that nine women out of ten in these parts don’t have time to bring up their children; that if they were given half the care you give the milk critters the young ones would have a better chance to start with. The air may be good enough in the fields, but it’s no elixir after it’s been shut up all day in a house so badly heated that you have to keep the windows down tight to keep things from freezing. Did you ever see where they slept in there? A little room off the kitchen just big enough for a bed and the window

frozen down from summer to summer. I told Brown the danger, but he reckoned he got enough fresh air out doors all day, and if his wife had a cough it was no place for her in a draught. Besides, he said, she was prowling around so late at night sewing for the kids that the little time she was in bed didn’t matter much. Now he’s afraid he’s caught it from her, but he hasn’t. He’s in too healthy a shape to catch anything. It’s different with a woman, spent with the children coming and the long hours and the work that you couldn’t hire a girl to do. I’m not so sure of the children being safe; they’re none too strong to start with.”

The young man resented this.

“Ain’t you pretty hard on Brown?” he demanded. “You won’t find a harder workin’ or a kinder man to his family anywhere; nor a woman more contented or that took more pride in her home than she did. I don’t like to hear him talked about as if he was to blame for this. Nor she wouldn’t.”

The doctor’s eyes wandered up to the window with its patched, starched curtains, and row of tomato cans holding weary-looking geraniums. There were new coverings of wall-paper around the tins—a pitiful reminder of a woman’s struggle to keep her house to the last.

“No, she wouldn’t,” he agreed quietly. “She thought the sun rose and set on Jim and the

kids.... And I’m not blaming him. He thought this driving and saving now was going to make things easier later on, and he just got the habit and couldn’t stop. What you all need around here is a little more physiological common sense. How’s Hazel?”

The question seemed ill-timed.

“First rate,” the husband answered. “She’s over there.”

The doctor looked over to the girl who a year ago had left the smoke of the town for the haven of the green country. The plume in her chiffon hat sagged a little; her wedding dress hung a bit limp, her face seemed noticeably pale through the tan. Altogether, to his professional eye, she didn’t look as well as when she left the town.

In the house the service was beginning. Through the open door in the strained quiet of the drowsy afternoon, the voice of the minister came steadily in the melancholy cadence of the old text:

“Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.”

In his dumb, helpless way the father tried to comfort the oldest little girl, the only one of the children who could know anything of the meaning of their loss. He was no callous materialist. He was suffering the full agony of his first great

sorrow and he couldn’t see why it had been sent to him.

At the gate the doctor gripped the minister’s hand warmly. “That was a fine sermon,” he said. “Never heard better for a time like this. Ye didn’t talk as though you were glad of the chance to warn us of the agony of hell. ‘Man is of few days and full of trouble.’ ... It’s a great text. Now some day,” the doctor was neither amused or irreverent, “some Sunday, can’t you preach from it again, and tell ’em how to stretch the time out and make it happier? I could give you some facts. Bless your heart, man, it would be the most opportune sermon you ever preached in your life. If you were in a city church you’d be fighting sweat shops and child labor. You’ve got them here, just a little more hidden from the public.”

When it was all over, Billy trudged off up the road after his mother, trudged because he was stiff and sore from the day’s experiences, also because his feet hurt. His Sunday shoes had been too big for him once, but they pinched his feet terribly since he started to go barefoot. They were hard, sturdy, unyielding little cases. Billy hated to go to Sunday school on account of them—but he always took them off on his way home. He asked