We had looked forward to this coming day with such eager expectation, but now that it was so near, we shrank with dread from facing it. A trouble so great as, under the circumstances, to deserve to be ranked as a calamity, had befallen us. Joe was gone. He had left us without a sign, at the time, of all others in our whole lives, when we most needed him. On the evening of the day that the plowing was done he had retired, as usual, to his little room off the kitchen, and when we awoke in the morning he was gone. That was all. But it was enough. It was a fact that seemed to darken our whole world. It was not alone that we missed his help; we had believed in his fidelity as one believes in the fidelity of a mother, and he had left us without a word of explanation or regret. The subject was so painful that, by tacit consent, we both avoided it. It would have been better, I think, to have expressed our views freely, for, as we could dwell on nothing else, we seldom spoke at all, and that added to the gloom of the situation. Joe had been gone several days, and we had been silently struggling in the Slough of Despond, when I awoke one morning filled with a new and ardent resolution, which I proceeded to carry into instant execution. Jessie was always the first one up. I heard her moving about in the kitchen, and, making a hasty toilet, joined her there. She was grinding coffee in the mill that was fastened securely to the door-jamb. It was, I believe, the noisiest mill in existence; its resonant whi-r-rr was like that of some giant grist-mill. Jessie suspended operations as I drew near to remark: "You're up early, Leslie." "Yes; I've thought of something, and--" "It's the early thought that is caught, same's the early worm," my sister remarked, unfeelingly. Then she added: "Excuse me a minute, Leslie, I must get this coffee ground, and can't talk against the mill." When the coffee was in the pot on the stove, she turned to me again: "Now what have you thought of that is so wonderful?" "It isn't wonderful, Jessie. It's sensible." "It amounts to the same thing." "Not in this case. First, I think we ought to stop grieving over Joe's desertion." Jessie's bright face clouded instantly: "It is cruel!" she protested. "I don't feel as if we ought to say that, Jessie. Joe has been a good, true, faithful friend to us, and he loved father; we, ourselves, loved father no more than Joe did--" "Why, Leslie!" "It is true, Jessie. I feel it, someway, and I am not going to blame Joe any more; not even in my own thoughts. It does no good, and it makes us very unhappy. Let's try to be cheerful again, Jessie, and make the best of it." "We must make the best of it whether we are cheerful or not." "Very well, then; one of the first things that we must do, if we are to depend on our own efforts, is to market that cantaloupe crop."