Then the attention of the visitors was turned to the farmhouse. Yes, it was small and run down and poor, the intention being to build a larger one "some time." But that same intention was known to have been expressed repeatedly for a period of twenty years past. And where were the boys? Well, that was the trouble, and furnished the excuse for his willingness to sell the place. He simply could not induce the boys to stay there and take an interest in things. Two of them, barely more than boys, had left the home nest in its meanness and degradation and hired out in town. The mother of the boys was living there because she had to, but upon her face were lines of suffering and disappointment and degradation. Yet in the midst of it all, strange to say, the father seemed to blame the boys and their mother for having conspired against the interests of the farm home and plotted to get away. In the course of his conversation he made it somewhat evident that he would have sold out and left sooner had the other members of the family not been so urgent about the matter, and that he was now holding on partly to indulge his spite and feeling of stubbornness in reference to them. The cheap novels one may pick up depict many a fictitious tragedy. But in the place just described lies the typical scene of thousands of real tragedies during the course of which numberless lives of boys and girls have been wrecked forever,--lives latent with possibilities of goodness and beauty, of mental and moral strength. And then, the bitterness and anguish of soul of the mothers of these lost members of a high humanity--what of that? The silent walls of an untimely grave in many cases closed them in, while much of the memory of their secret suffering lies buried with them. THE CHILDREN'S ROOM