“We have our troubles. You have not seen grandpa. He’s sick in bed. He can’t move except his hands and head and they shake all the time. He says he is a corpse with a chill and lies in his bed with nothing to do but wait. When I ask ‘Wait for what?’ He answers, ‘Tomorrow.’ To me tomorrow is like today. The cows will go to pasture, the creek will run over the same pebbles, the mail man will come at noon and stop for dinner, the lark will sing the same song; but if I stump my toe it will be well tomorrow. Go in and talk to grandpa. He likes to hear things. He lies on his bed until his bones ache. He looks out at the same trees and rocks and the same reach of the creek. I hope when he sleeps there is a change and he has dreams like mine and hears voices sweeter than those of the day; though I love the voice of the lark and the red bird and the wren; the murmur of the water on the rocks and most of all the little creatures we do not see and will not hear, unless we are very still. They are hidden in the grass and in the rocks. Alone not one of them can be heard, but together they make soft music, a chorus of glad hearts. One little blackbird makes a noise, but when a thousand speak at once it makes a song. So it seems to me, if I should live here always, with just grandpa and granny, what I said would be as the chirp of one little bug or the call of a lost blackbird; but if I chirp or call out with a thousand, my voice is the thousandth part of a song.” “Jeanne, we will go in and talk with your grandpa. Can he read, or do you read to him?” “He used to read before he broke his specks. I am trying hard to learn to read good, so I can read to him. The teacher sometimes boards with us; she says I will soon know how. It will be nice then. I try to read his Bible to him but the words are too big. Teacher says I need a book to tell me the meaning of big words. I know just the part of the Bible he loves and I am learning it by heart. I stand and say it to him, looking in the book and he thinks I read it.” “What do you say to him, Jeanne?” “‘And God shall wipe all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death; neither sorrow nor dying; neither shall there be any more pain.’ And I know all of the fourteenth chapter of John, which tells us not to let our troubles worry us, because in the Father’s house there is a home of many rooms and one is for me. And when I say, ‘Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you;’ he makes me read it again. * *” They went in and spent an hour with the old man. Seeing them was a break in his bedridden monotony, shifting scene and introducing new characters.