"'An' never-with'rin' flowers; Death, like a narrow sea, divides This heavenly land from ours.'" Rankin stooped in the anguish of a fat man, and gathered up an armful of the kindlings he had been splitting, and started toward the house. As he stamped up the steps into the kitchen, he sang on: "'Sweet fields beyond the--' "Hello, kid," he suddenly said, interrupting his own song, "where'd you come from?" He stretched out his right arm and covering his little son's head with his big palm he rolled it round and round on the boy's shoulders as he passed. And then suddenly Rankin felt a strange unnatural chill in the atmosphere of his home. There was the supper table laid, the baby was already sitting up to it, pounding his tin waiter hungrily with his spoon, while his little sister tried to distract his attention from his own hunger by cutting antics on the dining-room floor. The pleasant odor of fried potatoes filled the kitchen, the coffee steamed in the pot, its fragrant aroma had reached him even in the woodshed. It was the hour of all others in the day that he liked; he would take the tin pan presently out to the cistern pump and blow like a porpoise as he washed his face, then he would swing the pan at arm's length, scattering the water afar, and come groping into the kitchen toward the long towel that hung in an endless belt on a roller behind the door. And then they would have supper, and he could joke his little wife and his little boy, and give the baby prohibited tid-bits from his plate. He felt the change in the atmosphere again as he sat down to the supper table, and yet he did not reason about such things, or probe their causes deeply. He thought it was their poverty that was worrying his wife. That cloud sometimes darkened the home for them of late. "Well, cheer up," he said, as he sat down to the table, his coat still off; "we're poor but honest parents. Remember, Mollie, what the good Book says: 'I have never seen the righteous forsaken, ner his seed beggin' bread.' I can't qualify under the first clause, but I can under the second. There never was a better man than your Grampa Rankin, Willie. How'd ye get along at school to-day?" he asked presently, still addressing the boy. "You want to get a hump on yourself; I'm goin' to put you in Jerry Garwood's office one o' these days, an' make a lawyer of you, ye know." But try as he would to rally them he failed, and he looked curiously at last from his son to his wife, and back again. Then it dawned upon him. "Look'e here," he said, placing his fists on the table, his knife sticking up from one, his fork from the other, "you two's got some pleasant surprise fer papa; I can see it in your faces. Le's see, is this my birthday? What kind of a game're you an' mama puttin' up on the old man, anyhow?" He looked at his son.