But Old Dalton had breasted the tape, the first of his race to do it. And if it had not been for this wave of loneliness; this parching, astringent wind of sorrow that seemed to dry up the oil of his joints, evaporate the simple liquor of his thought, put out the vital sparkle in his eye; and now, latest act of dispossession, to milk his old veins of their warmth--if it had not been for this influence and prescience, Old Dalton might have run hardily quite a good little way into his second century. But somewhere, afar and apart, the finger was about to descend upon the chronometer that timed his race. The dust atoms that a hundred years ago had been exalted to make a man now clamored for their humble rehabilitation. Man shall never, in this mortal body we use, exemplify perpetual motion. Old Dave Dalton turned in his bed. Something beyond the chilliness was wrong with him, and he did not know what it was. There is no condition so vexatious as an unexplainable lack of ease; and Old Dalton twisted, gathered up his knees, straightened them again, tensed, relaxed, shifted the bedclothes, and busily but vainly cast about for the source of his disquiet. Ah!--the thought slipped into his mind like a late guest. "Et's thame sticks I forgot, ey," the old man muttered as he forthwith and arduously rose into a sitting position and pushed the blankets off him. "Ey, ey, that's it--the sticks for the mornin'!" The chopping of the wood for the morning fire, in order that the sower, haymaker, or harvester, as the seasonal case might be, should have as little delay as possible in getting to his field or meadow; this had been a regular chore of Old Dalton's, a function never omitted before in all the scope of his methodical and assiduous days. "Ey, but I never thought now that I'd ever lave that job not done," he muttered as he shuffled slowly and sheepishly down the stairs. "Ey, ey ... ma!" There she was, at the foot of the stairs! Old Dalton saw her, as plainly as if it had been daylight. Gray apron with its horseshoe pattern almost obliterated by many washings, waist bulging halely, shoulders bowed forward, old wool hood tied over her head. There she was, with her visage, that in all their years together had not changed for him, squeezed and parched into the wrinkles of her thirty-four thousand days. (The only difference Old Dalton could see, as he stopped, his elbows bent a little, and regarded her in his quelling masculine way, resided in the eyes. Instead of being held downcast in the old attitude of deference, they now looked across at him, straight level, and--summoning!) Immobile age and Old Dalton's habit kept him from any visible expression of the welcome that lay warm (though tempered by an odd feeling of strangeness due to that look she carried in her eyes) in his soul.