I sat on the door-step to rest, and invited the children to look at the pictures, which they did, hesitatingly at first, with timid advances, in which curiosity struggled with their fear of the unfamiliar. But they grew bolder as I invented stories to match the illustrations, and presently they were all nestling about me in the ease of absorbed attention. One little girl of four or five, who had eyed me at first with an anxious look of alarm, now stood leaning over my shoulder with an arm about my neck, and her soft brown hair, escaped from her sun-bonnet, touching my face, while she looked down upon the pictures, and I could feel her breath quickening as the story neared its climax. I pressed on presently, and the children ran by my side, asking for yet one story more, and finally calling their good-byes and waving their hands to me as I disappeared around a curve in the road. A few miles farther on I came to a lonely farm-house, where I knocked in quest of a dinner. The open door revealed a woman's face, so sad and worn, so full of care and of weary years of slavish drudgery, that quite instinctively I began to apologize, and to conceal my real purpose in aimless inquiry about the way. "I do not know," she said; "but won't you come in? The boys will soon be at home for dinner, and they can tell you." Her voice was soft and sweet, and her manner so reassuring that I gladly followed her into the sitting-room, where she introduced me to her daughter, a slender, dark young woman, who sat sewing by an open window. I hastened to make myself known as a workman on my way to Wilkesbarre, where I hoped to get employment, and I told them of my encounter with the carpenter at the Falls. They smiled as though the flavor of his humor was not lost to them, and they spoke of other characters at the settlement quite as odd as he. Both women were dressed in the plainest calico, and without a touch of ornament, and the house was poor; poor to the verge of poverty; but the walls were free from chromoes and worsted mottoes, and showed, instead, a few good engravings, and the rag-carpet on the floor blent in accordant colors, and curtains hung neatly at the windows. Dinner was waiting, and presently the mother said that we would delay it no longer for the boys. We sat down at a table in a rough shed which opened from the sitting-room. A spotless cloth covered the board, and the service was simple and tasteful, and there was the uncommon luxury of napkins. The dinner moved with unembarrassed ease. We talked of the surrounding country, and its resemblance to other regions, and of the political situation. The mother led the talk, and tactfully guarded it from any approach to silence or to topics too intimate. Once, however, she touched lightly upon a former home in a prosperous corner of another State, and instantly I felt the hint of some family tragedy.