But this blessed state of affairs was not long to continue. Anna, as she grew stronger, felt the necessity of seeking employment, but to this the baby proved a formidable obstacle. No one would give a young woman, hampered with a child, work. She would come back to the baby at night worn out in mind and body, after a day of fruitless searching. These long trips of the little mother, with the consequent long absence and exhaustion on her return, did not improve the little one's health, and almost before Anna realized it was ailing, the baby sickened and died. It was her cruelest blow. For the child's sake she had taken up her interest in life, made plans; and was ready to work her fingers to the bone, but it was not to be and with the first falling of the clods on the little coffin, Anna felt the last ray of hope extinguished from her heart. CHAPTER IX. ON THE THRESHOLD OF SHELTER. Alas! To-day I would give everything To see a friend's face, or hear voice That had the slightest tone of comfort in it.--_Longfellow_. About two miles from the town of Belden, N. H., stands an irregular farm house that looks more like two dwellings forced to pass as one. One part of it is all gables, and tile, and chimney corners, and antiquity, and the other is square, slated, and of the newest cut, outside and in. The farm is the property of Squire Amasa Bartlett, a good type of the big man of the small place. He was a contented and would have been a happy man--or at least thought he would have been--if the dearest wish of his life could have been realized. It was that his son, Dave, and his wife's niece, Kate, should marry. Kate was an orphan and the Squire's ward. She owned the adjoining land, that was farmed with the Squire's as one. So that Cupid would not have come to them empty handed; but the young people appeared to have little interest in each other apart from that cousinly affection which young people who are brought together would in all probability feel for each other. Dave was a handsome, dark-eyed young man, whose silence passed with some for sulkiness; but he was not sulky--only deep and thoughtful, and perhaps a little more devoid of levity than becomes a young man of twenty-five. He had great force of character--you might have seen that from his grave brow, and felt it in his simple speech and manner, that was absolutely free from affectation. Dave was his mother's idol, but his utter lack of worldliness, his inability to drive a shrewd bargain sometimes annoyed his father, who was a just, but an undeniably hard man, who demanded a hundred cents for his dollar every day in the year.