Letters came with gratifying regularity—fortnightly—from Roxbury. The boy was going to school and making amends for his “backwardness” by diligence and proficiency. I have laid away in our family Bible quaintly worded “Rewards of Merit”—printed forms upon paper which crackles under the fingers that unfold it—testifying to perfect recitations and good behavior. The boy’s name and the testimonials are filled in by his woman teacher in legible, ladylike script. The fortnightly epistles told of the child’s health and “nice” behavior. I fancy that more stress was laid upon the last item by his grandmother than upon the first. My father expressed himself as satisfied with the result of the experiment. The mother mourned secretly for the merry voice and bonny face of her darling. At the end of three months the longing leaped the bounds of wifely submission, and she won from her husband the admission that home was not home without his boy. They would go in company to Roxbury next summer and bring him back with them. If he were to be sent from home to school, they would commit him to the Olney or Richmond kinspeople. Roxbury was a cruel distance from central Virginia. A month later two letters were brought to my father’s counting-room with the Richmond mail. One told of Edwin’s dangerous illness, the second of his death and burial. His malady—brain-fever—was set down by the grandmother to “the visitation of God.” In view of his rapid progress in learning, and the strict discipline of the household in which he studied the lessons to be recited on the morrow, and without a blunder, we may hold a different opinion, and one that exonerates the Deity of direct interference in the work. Be this as it may, the precious five-year-old had died so far from his mother’s arms that, had she set out immediately upon receipt of the news of his illness, a month would have elapsed between the departure of the letter from Roxbury and her arrival there, if she had travelled day and night. His earthly education was finished. The stricken father, staring at the brace of fatal letters—couched, you may be sure, in duly pietistic phrase and interlarded with Scripture texts—had the terrible task of breaking the news to the mother whose happy dream and talk were all of “when we go North for our boy.” He carried the letters home. His wife was not in “the chamber,” where a colored nurse—another family servant—was in charge of the two little girls. Hearing her footsteps approaching presently, the strong man’s heart failed him suddenly. He retreated behind the open door, actually afraid to face the gentle woman to whom his will was law. Suspecting a practical joke, my light-hearted mother pulled back the door, the knob of which he had clutched in his desperate misery, saw his face and the letters in his hand, and fell in a dead faint at his feet.