Of course I made light of her premonition, but thereafter I watched her with minute care, and called on the doctor at the slightest sign of change. We sang to her, we read to her, and Zulime spent long hours reading to her or sitting beside her. She was entirely happy except when, at intervals, her mysterious malady,--something she could not describe,--filled her eyes with terror. She loved to sit in the kitchen and watch her new daughter presiding over its activities, and submitted, with pathetic pride, to any change which Zulime proposed. "I am perfectly contented," she said to me, "except----" "Except what, mother?" "The grandchild. I want to see my grandchild." One of our regular excursions for several years had been a drive (usually on Sunday) over the ridge to Lewis Valley, where Frank McClintock still lived. Among my earliest memories is a terror of this road, for it led up a long, wooded hill, which seemed to me, as a child, a dangerous mountain pass. Many, many times since then I had made the climb, sometimes in the spring, sometimes in midsummer, but now my plans included my wife. Mother was eager to go. "I can stand the ride if you will drive and be careful going down hill," she said to me--and so, although I was a little in doubt about the effect upon her heart, I hired a team, and early of a clear June morning we started for Mindoro. It was like riding back into the hopeful, happy past, for both the old people. Father was full of wistful reminiscences of "the early days," but mother, who sat beside Zulime, made no comment, although her face shone with inward joy of the scene, the talk--until we came to the steep descent which scared her. Clinging to her seat with pitiful intensity she saw nothing but dangerous abysses until we reached the level road on the opposite side of the ridge. It was glorious June, and in this I now rejoice, for it proved to be the last time that we made the crossing of the long hill together. I was glad to have her visit her brother's home once more. Change was coming to him as well as to her. His prodigious muscles and his boyish gayety were fading away together. Though still delightfully jolly and hospitable, his temper was distinctly less buoyant. He still played the fiddle; but like his brother, David, he found less and less joy in it, for his stiffened fingers refused to do his bidding. The strings which once sang clear and sweet, failed of their proper pitch, and these discords irritated and saddened him. Aunt Lorette, his handsome, rosy-cheeked wife, was beginning to complain smilingly, of being lame and "no account," but she provided a beautiful chicken dinner, gayly "visiting" while she did it, with mother sitting by to watch her at the job as she had done so many times before.