“It’s my fault, Susan. I want to tell you, though I do it to my shame, what a woman your old aunt is. She always put a person’s feeling above money. You see, it was this way: I had a fever to go West, and to marry, and Susan she wanted to marry a young farmer who owned an old Cape farm. But one of us had to stay with the folks. She was tender-hearted, Susan was, and she used to love me more than her own life,—she always loved others more than herself,—and one day, under the apple-trees, she said to me, ‘Martin,’ said she, ‘you may go West, and I’ll live with father and mother.’ When I came to be propounded for the Church, my conscience troubled me so that I made a covenant with myself that I would always be true to my twin sister Susan. And I nailed that covenant behind a board in the garret. And now I am going back to find it, and to keep it. Just hear this letter. She says:— “‘Mother’s long sickness caused the mortgage, and the interest on it grew. Now they are going to sell the old place at vendue, and I’ll have to go to the poorhouse, or else live on the church, which is poor. _Even my Thanksgiving turkeys will be sold._’ “Did you hear that, Susan? I remember how we used to go together hunting turkeys’ nests when, we were young. A turkey is a sly bird, and hides her nest, and always goes an opposite way when she starts for her nest. How we used to follow the turkeys slyly amid the dews, wild roses, and laurels, so as to find their nests! And now even her turkeys are to be sold! Susan, I feel as though I hadn’t done as I ought to. I must go back East, and I will do the right thing in the end. I will keep the covenant. It was Susan that gave me a chance in life. I can hear the old folks that are dead callin’, ‘Come home, come home;’ seems as though I could.” “Grandfather, have you any spare money?” “What makes you ask that, child?” “Couldn’t you buy the old place and give it to her?” “To Susan? To Susan? Why, bless your heart, that’s just what I’ve just been thinking! If I ought to—and a man ought to do what he ought, or he’ll feel just as he hadn’t ought to, and I feel that way now. No, Susan, none of those auction-attending folks shall eat my sister Susan’s turkeys this year. We’ll get ready and go. You never saw the sea, did you?” “No; nor old houses with ghost-rooms. It all seems like a story.” “Nor rocks, nor walls, nor great apple-orchards, nor woods of old oak-trees?” “No, nor a Thanksgiving—a real true one, grandpa.” “Well, child, you shall see a real old New England Thanksgiving this year, and I think it will be one well worth seeing. We’ll roast those turkeys ourselves. They’re saying ‘quit, quit’ to the mortgage now. I’m going to keep my covenant. It makes me happy to think of it. But, as I said, we will not let them know that we are coming. And, Susan, Susan, you maybe will hear that last song of the robin.”