“Sent for a priest?” I exclaimed, completely mystified. “Yes,” she whispered. “He must have been a Catholic all the time. And the priest wouldn’t come either. _That’s what that old preacher got for being so mean._” She continued: “That preacher wasn’t much meaner than the man is in the company store.” She was bristling again. “He won’t deliver goods up here unless you run a big bill. If I want anything much while big Frank here is at work, I have to take Jimmy’s little play express-wagon and haul it up.” And now she was telling me of her terrible fright three days ago, down at the company store, when there was a rumor of an accident in one of the far tunnels of the mine. “All the foreign women came running down the hill, half-crazy. I am used to false alarms, but I could hardly get up to this house with my goods. I was expecting to see big Frank brought in, just like he was before little Frank was born, eight years ago.” Little Frank lifted his face from its business of eating to listen. “The first thing that boy ever saw was his father on the floor there, covered with blood.” “You don’t remember it, Frank?” asked his father, grinning. “Nope.” The wife continued: “There was only one doctor came. We had a time between us. The other doctor was tendin’ the men husband had dug out. The coal fell on them and mashed them flat. It couldn’t quite mash husband. He’s too tough,” she said, lovingly. “He grabbed his pick and he tunnelled his way through, with the blood squirting out of him.” Husband grinned like a petted child. He said: “It wasn’t quite as bad as that, but I was bloody, all right.” She continued with a gesture of impatience: “This is cheerful Sunday night talk. Let’s try something else. What kind of a poem are you goin’ to read?” “It tells boys how to be great men, but it’s for fellows of from fifteen to twenty. You’ll have to save it for your sons till they grow a bit.” She was at the foot of the stairway like a flash. “Son, dress and come down to supper.” Son was down almost as soon as she was in her chair, pulling on a stocking as he came. And he was hungry. He ate while we talked on and on. IV THE GRANDSONS OF THE KING After the supper the dishes waited. The wife said: “Now we will have the poetry.” I said in my heart, “Maybe this is the one house in a hundred where the seed of these verses will be sown upon good ground.”