Dave had missed her sorely. People had said the Message would not be long coming to him after she went. Perhaps if he had been in the usual case of those who have passed the seventh decade--weary and halt and without employment or the ability or wish for it--he would have brooded and worried himself into the grave very soon after the passing of his old "mate" and one living contemporary. But he was a born, inured, and inveterate worker, and as long as there were "chores" for him to do he felt ample excuse for continuing to exist. Old Dalton still had the obsession, too, that while and where he lived he was "boss" and manager; and one solid, sustaining thought that helped to keep him living was that if he died the Dalton farm (it was the original old homestead that these young descendants of his occupied) would be without its essential head and squire. So sturdy, so busy, and so well had he been always that all the deaths he had seen in his journey down a hundred years of mortality had failed to bring home to him the grave and puissant image of death as a personal visitant. "Ey, I'm always out wur-rkin' when they send fur me, I guess," was the joke he had made at eighty and repeated so often since that now he said it quite naively and seriously, as a fact and a credible explanation. But, although it took time to show its effect, Nanny's going hit him a little harder than any of the other deaths he had witnessed. She had traveled with him so long and so doughtily that he had never been able to form any anticipative picture of himself without her. Indeed, even now it felt as if she had merely "gone off visitin'," and would be back in time to knit him a pair of mitts before the cold weather came. It was the odd idea about the world growing "yellow-lookin'"--sometimes he said "red-lookin'" and at other times seemed not quite certain which description conveyed the vague hue of his fancy--that appeared to be pulling him to pieces, undermining him, more than any other influence. Most people, however, were accustomed to consider the hallucination an effect of Mother Dalton's removal and a presage of Old Dalton's own passing. This odd yellowness (or redness), as of grass over which chaff from the threshing-mill has blown, lay across the old pasture on this afternoon of his second century, as Old Dalton went to water the superannuated black horse that whinnied at his approach. "Ey, Charley," he said, reflectively, as he took the old beast by the forelock to lead it up to the pump--"ey, Charley-boy"; then, as the horse, diminishing the space between its forefoot and his heel with a strange ease, almost trod on him--"ey, boy--steady there, now. Es yur spavin not throublin' ye th' day, then? Ye walk that free. S-steady, boy--ey!" But Grace, the granddaughter, glancing across the pasture as she came to the kitchen door to empty potato peelings, put it differently.