“NEPHEW ALEXANDER: That was your grandfather’s name, and a good one. They say you are honest, with fewer tricks than most young men in the city. I inquired two years ago. I was there and saw your house, but it wasn’t for me to go in. I’ve kept track of my family, what there is left; nobody now but you and your sister. When your father was a boy he came to the farm in New Hampshire and staid a week, but he found me poor company and never came again. If he had and was older, I was going to——; but no matter, I’ve fixed it, and leave it for you to do right for me. Something tells me you will. I am too old to face it, God knows, and he has forgiven me. I am an old man. The doctors say I am not long for this world. I am ninety now, and sitting here alone with no soul in the house; things come back plainer,—folks I knew years ago, and one is standing by the door and looking at me as if he was not satisfied the way I’ve fixed it, and wants me to put it down again, but I can’t to-night, my head is so queer. My candle is nearly out, and I can’t see. To-morrow I’ll try and write again and tell you why you must go to the farm and do right.” Here there was evidently an effort to write a word with a pen which had no ink in it, and then the hand must have grown powerless and dropped, clasping the side of the table as they found it, and the old man was dead. Alex.’s voice shook as he read this letter, while even the loquacious Amy was silent, wondering what it all meant. “There’s something on the other side of the sheet,—some words,” she said at last, and turning the paper over, Alex. saw, written very plainly, the name “Crosby,” and after it another name he could not make out, except that the first was “Joel.” “Can you tell me what that last name is?” he asked his sister. She could not, and Ruth next tried her skill. “The first letter is certainly ‘P,’ though a very queer one,” she said. “Can it be ‘Pleasure’?” “‘Pleasure’? No. There’s a ‘g,’ or a ‘y’ in it. Try again,” Alex. said, and Ruth tried again with better success. “It must be ‘Pledges,’” she suggested. “‘Pledges,’” Alex. repeated, and taking the paper from Ruth, he made “Pledgers” distinctly from the irregular letters. “‘Pledgers,’ that’s funny,” he said, with a thought of Old Pledger and the girl. Neither Amy nor Ruth saw anything funny in the names. They were too much absorbed in what the old man had written, and asked Mrs. Marsh what she knew of him. She knew very little, except that he once lived on a farm among the New Hampshire hills, and her husband, when a boy, had spent a week with him, but was glad to get away. “Since your father died I have scarcely given the man a thought,” she added. “I did hear, in a roundabout way, that he had gone West; I fancied him dead long ago. He was said to be very eccentric,—half crazy, or something.”