“They asked me to come, an' I swore it. There's a queer blight as creeps inter our country, which without thet might be like everlasting Paradise. Ourn is a land of summer an' flowers, but up here in this ice-bound region, the air is like water in runnin' brooks, it puts life an' health in ye.” “There's the blight o' consumption here. We're foreordained to suffer all over this airth,” muttered the woman. “But there it comes in waves of trouble--in awful haste--an' takes all at once, an' them that's well flees away and the sick dies alone. So the yellow fever come creepin' inter my home, fur Minnie was my child--the daughter I'd keered fur; an' fust the baby went from her arms, an' then little Silas (arter you, sir). Then Minnie sickened, an' her laugh is only an echo in my heart, for she died and was berried, the baby in her arms, and Jim was took next--an' he says” (only the ticking of the clock sounded now, never so loud before): “'I want you, dad,' (he called me dad) 'to go to my old home in Maine. I want you to tell my father I named my dead boy for him, and I thought of his frugal, saving life with pain, and yet I am proud that his name is respected as that of an honest man, whose word is his bond. I'll never go up the old lane again,' says Jim, 'nor see mother standing in the door with her bright eyes and red cheeks that I used to think was like winter apples. And the old horse, she said she'd care for, I won't see him again, nor hear the bells. In this land of summer I only long for winter, and dad, if I could hear those hoarse old jolly bells I'd die in peace. Queer, ain't it? And I remember some rides I took mother; she wan't afraid of the colt, and looked so pretty, a white hood over her dark hair. You go, dad, and say I was sorry, and I'd planned to come some day prosperous and happy, but it's never to be. Tell mother to think of me when she goes a Sunday afternoon to the buryin'-ground, as she used to with me, and by those little graves I fek her mother's heart beat for me, her living child, and I knew, though she said nothing, she cared for me.' He died tell-in' me this, marm, an' was berried by my girl, an' I think it was meant kind they went together, for both would a pined apart. So I've come all the way from Texas, trampin' for weary months, for I was poor, to give you Jim's words.” “Dead! Jim dead!” cried Silas, in a queer, dazed way. “M'ri,” querulously, “you alius sed he was so helthy!” She went to him and laid her hand on his bowed head. “An' we've saved an' scrimped an' pinched fur strangers, M'ri, fur there ain't no Lowell to have the prop'ty, an' I meant it all fur Jim. When he was to come back he'd find he was prosperous, an' he'd think how I tried to make him so.” “The Lord don't mean all dark clouds in this life,” said the stranger. “Out of that pestilence, that never touched her with its foul breath, came a child, with Minnie's face and laugh, but Jim's own eyes--a bit of mother an' father.”