His profession of surveyor was the sole source of income to Josiah’s household. It was a steady, reasonable prop. But it made no provision for unintermittent doctor’s bills, two funerals and the wet-nursing of an eighth child. In most walks of life, it is more costly to bury a child than to support it. The family was in debt. Josiah had sold his horse and carriage; he had tried to sell an anonymous land lot near Red Bear, Wyoming, which hope of minerals had tempted him to purchase ten years before. At that time, he had been the prosperous, sanguine father of two children, the husband of a wife with an amiable figure. Stubbornness alone now kept him from letting the land lapse through failure of tax payment. He had lost hope of it. But a bitter strain in the man took pleasure in the irony of his remote, draining possession. It served him as a reminder of past projects, as a quite literally dry yet eloquent allusion to the downward grade which he fancied he had traversed by a route measured with the coming of new babies and the going of old hopes. Humor had a lodging in Josiah’s heart. And so it was that, mortgaging his cottage, he paid his tax on the Wyoming plot, all with a pinch of perverse amusement. “We’ll save it as a burial ground for you and me, Sarah,” he remarked. And when his wife did not smile at the jest, wincing only with the gall beneath it, he was logical enough to know his pleasantry successful. They sat in the parlor, that night of Quincy’s home-coming. The past year of Sarah’s life was stamped upon her face; or rather it seemed to have possessed it, to have wrung and tortured it into the very symbol of that past year’s spirit. The final trial had begun with the first stirrings of Quincy. Indeed, this mute yet shattering oracle within a woman’s body is often a mark of agony upon her soul. At the end, is the travail of the flesh. But often, that anguish comes almost as a balm, when the soul’s misery and the mind’s labor have made her faint, to revive in the pain of birth a quickened mother from what was an almost lifeless woman, numbed with her foreboding. Such was the case with Sarah. While Nature worked in her, she had loathed her function. The long shadow of labor held her torpid, spiritless. The act of bearing flung her once more into the light, into the living. It was as if she, also, had been born. But the new throb in her breast, like that in her child, was frail and hazardous. And then had come the fever; the bearing off of Quincy beyond sight and helping, almost beyond thought; the double loss; the sudden loom once more into reality of this infant whom a cloud of fate had shut off from the mother’s vision.