“At the end of five years, they had two children—Frederick and Elizabeth—Elizabeth is still living down in the town, a very old woman. After the children were born, Mrs. Beaver realized that she could never go back to her home across the sea. She would never have the money to pay her passage. She felt like a caged lion pining behind iron bars. Before the babies came she hoped to save money enough to go back and take her husband along—providing he would go. If not, she would go alone. He was a hunchback and not really kind to her, though he loved her after the manner of a wild animal loving its mate. “One day Beaver came home and found the children crying with hunger. They were only four and two years old. The boy could talk enough to inform his father that his mother had gone up to the loft and would not come down. The man climbed up the ladder and was horrified to find his wife hanging to a rafter—dead. She had taken the rope out of the bed to hang herself with. Her longing and longing for the home across the sea had ceased forever. If you will come to the door I can show you the rafter on which she was hanging. No? Don’t care to? “Yes, the father lived right here with the children after that. He got a house keeper from somewhere in the neighborhood. He was young and the love of life was still in his soul, but he never married another woman. Years afterward the children would find him sitting under the rafter on which his wife died, weeping like a child. “Yes, the son, young Fred, built the new house over yonder, after he got married, and took his father there to live. But the old man would come back daily and sit in the open door and sing the German hymn that was the favorite with his wife when they were courting across the sea. “Yes, they say the house is haunted, since the old man died. People passing on moonlight nights insist that they see Beaver and his wife sitting in the open door, and hear a low crooning song. Me? Oh, I think the noise is the sighing of the pines over yonder.” THE HOME-SICK HORSES “Do horses think?” asked a lady of my acquaintance, and I hastened to assure her that they did. I told her of the horse my boy drives every Saturday evening to sell newspapers to the farmers near our home. Just so soon as the horse sees that the boy is delivering papers he turns into the gate of every regular customer and stops. If strangers get into the buggy old “Vinci” turns his head to see who it is and what they look like.