Ben—who would have liked to ride in the coach that carried me away to school—has had a great many rides since then—rough rides, and hard ones, over the road of life. He does not rake up the falling leaves for bonfires, as he did once; he is grown a man, and is fighting his way somewhere in our western world, to the short-lived honors of time. He was married not long ago; his wife I remembered as one of my playmates at my first school; she was beautiful, but fragile as a leaf. She died within a year of their marriage. Ben was but four years my senior; but this grief has made him ten years older. He does not say it, but his eye and his figure tell it. The nurse who put the purse in my hand that dismal morning is grown a feeble old woman. She was over fifty then; she may well be seventy now. She did not know my voice when I went to see her the other day, nor did she know my face at all. She repeated the name when I told it to her—Paul, Paul—she did not remember any Paul, except a little boy, a long while ago. —“To whom you gave a purse when he went away, and told him to say nothing to Lilly or to Ben?” —“Yes, that Paul”—says the old woman exultingly—“do you know him?” And when I told her—“She would not have believed it!” But she did, and took hold of my hand again (for she was blind), and then smoothed down the plaits of her apron, and jogged her cap strings, to look tidy in the presence of “the gentleman.” And she told me long stories about the old house and how other people came in afterward; and she called me “sir” sometimes, and sometimes “Paul.” But I asked her to say only Paul; she seemed glad for this, and talked easier, and went on to tell of my old playmates, and how we used to ride the pony—poor Jacko!—and how we gathered nuts—such heaping piles; and how we used to play at fox and geese through the long winter evenings; and how my poor mother would smile—but here I asked her to stop. She could not have gone on much longer, for I believe she loved our house and people better than she loved her own. As for my uncle, the cold, silent man, who lived with his books in the house upon the hill, and who used to frighten me sometimes with his look, he grew very feeble after I had left, and almost crazed. The country people said that he was mad; and Isabel, with her sweet heart, clung to him, and would lead him out, when his step tottered, to the seat in the garden, and read to him out of the books he loved to hear. And sometimes, they told me, she would read to him some letters that I had written to Lilly or to Ben, and ask him if he remembered Paul, who saved her from drowning under the tree in the meadow? But he could only shake his head and mutter something about how old and feeble he had grown.