"Don't be frightened," said my husband, trembling, in a would-be off-hand voice, "it's nothing very serious--just a bad shaking--I told him that new mare of his wasn't to be trusted, and there was a nasty stone just where she threw him. He's stunned a bit, that's all--no bones broken. I have sent for the doctor. Now look here, Polly----" He opened his arms across the doorway, but I broke through them furiously. Did he remember the night when little Bobby shot himself, trying to get an opossum skin for his mother's birthday? I was not kept back then. We ran together, hand in hand, to meet our common woe, and I was first at the spot, and it was on my breast that he lay to breathe his last. Why not now, when a worse thing had befallen me? No, I don't mean that; nothing could be worse--except that every year your child is with you adds innumerable fresh strands to the rope of woven heart-strings already binding you to him, and thus makes more to bleed and ache when the wrench comes. And Harry was twenty-three--twenty-three, and over six feet, and the handsomest young fellow in the whole country! I flew full speed to find him, and see what they were doing to him. It was my mother's right, which a dozen fathers should not deprive me of. At the garden gate I met the procession coming in. They carried him carefully on a mattress, over saplings roped together. A little rabble of people followed, one of them leading the fiend that had done the mischief, a vicious, half-broken, buck-jumping brute that had worried us for a long time, although Harry always trusted his own fine horsemanship to get the better of her tantrums. And rightly, too. If he had not been in a bad temper, poor darling, and doubtless running risks for the perverse satisfaction of doing so, because of the mood he was in, nothing in the shape of a horse could have thrown him. He was notoriously the best rider of the day--at any rate, of our neighbourhood. I slammed the gate to shut out everybody, and the bearers lowered his litter, and I bent over him. He did not know me. When I leaned down to listen if he breathed, I saw a little bubble of blood oozing from his mouth; then I knew that he was more than stunned--that it was worse even than broken bones. I left off crying, and became quite calm. I had to.