“I want him so, Aunt Martha!” he exclaimed. “I want him so! If he was dead, as my mother is, I’d never think of it. But somewhere he’s living, and I can’t get to him, and he won’t come to me, and no one will tell me why, and there’s such a mystery about it all. Oh, I can’t understand it!” Aunt Martha dropped to her knees beside his chair and drew his head down to her shoulder. “There, there!” she said soothingly, “never mind! It’ll all end happily, I know. You’re tired to-night, and it’s very late. Come, go to bed now, that’s a good boy. Things’ll look brighter in the morning.” So, with gentle words, she led him to his room, gave him a tender good-night, and then went about her duties, one of those sweet souls that love to smooth out the hard places on life’s pathway for the tender feet of others. Thank Heaven that they live! Dannie went to bed, but not to sleep. He could not forget his grandfather’s mighty anger; and the old man’s declaration, made with such terrible emphasis, kept ringing in his ears, “No better deed could be done by any one than to pull their accursed stakes from the ground and fling ’em, one and all, into the water of the brook.” After a while he rose and looked out of the window. The country was flooded with moonlight. The woods and fields were bathed in it. The willows that marked the sinuous course of the brook were transformed into shivering masses of silver. The public road, leading to the west, wound, luminously gray, through the meadow and under the trees. Black, in the shadowed face of the ridge, lay the mouth of the gap, and white and clear-cut against it shone out the marble column that marked the sacred grave. Dannie imagined that he could almost see the line of stakes set by the engineers, starting at the big rock in the potato field, cutting down by the corner of the meadow, across the road, through the graveyard, and into the gap. He wondered how long it would be before the railroad would be built, before the trains would be rolling by, before the greensward of the burial place would be cut and slashed and torn by the picks and spades of workmen, before the graves themselves would tremble and shrink beneath the strain and stress of ponderous engines and thundering trains. The thing was too dreadful to contemplate. And again, more clear, more distinct, more impressive than ever, the words of Abner Pickett rang through his mind, “No better deed could be done by any one than to pull their accursed stakes from the ground and fling ’em, one and all, into the water of the brook.”