J.M. put his clean and polished spectacles back on his nose and looked through them into the next room, where Ivan Petrofsky sat devouring his first lesson in political economy. Then he turned, beaming like an amiable sphinx upon his interrogator. "Do you know—I never realized it myself until just lately," he said.
BY ABANA AND PHARPAR
Fields, green fields of Shining River,
Lightly left too soon
In the stormy equinoctial,
In the hunter's moon,—
Snow-blown fields of Shining River
I shall once more tread;
I shall walk their crested hollows,
Living or dead.
FINIS
To old Mrs. Prentiss, watching apprehensively each low mountain dawn, the long, golden days of the warm autumn formed a series of blessed reprieves from the loom which hung over her. With her inherited and trained sense of reality, she could not cheat herself into forgetting, even for a moment, that her fate was certain, but, nevertheless, she took a breathless enjoyment in each day, as it passed and did not bring the dreaded change in her life. She spoke to her husband about this feeling as they sat on the front step one October evening, when the air was as mild as in late May, breaking the calm silence, in which they usually sat, by saying, "Seems as though this weather was just made for us, don't it, father?"
The old man stirred uneasily in his chair. "I dun'no'—seems sometimes to me as though I'd ruther have winter come and be done with it. If we've got to go as soon as cold weather sets in, we might as well go and have it over with. As 'tis, I keep on saying good-by in my mind to things and folks every minute, and then get up in the morning to begin it all again. This afternoon I was down the river where I saved Hiram's life when he was a little fellow—the old black whirl-hole. I got to thinking about that time, I never was real sure till then I wouldn't be a coward if it come right down to it. Seems as though I'd been more of a man ever since. It's been a real comfort to me to look at that whirl-hole, and that afternoon it come over me that after this there wouldn't be a single thing any more to remind us of anything good or bad, we've ever done. It'll be most as if we hadn't lived at all. I just felt as though I couldn't go away from everything and everybody I've ever known down to Hiram's stuffy little flat. And yet I suppose we are real lucky to have such a good son as Hiram now the others are all gone. I dun'no' what we'd do if 'tweren't for him."
"Do!" cried his wife bitterly. "We could go on living right in this valley where we belong, if 'twas only in the poor-house!"
The old man answered reasonably, as though trying to convince himself, "Well, I suppose it's really flying in the face of Providence to feel so. The doctor says your lungs ain't strong enough to stand another of our winters in the mountains, fussing over stove fires, and zero weather and all, and I'm so ailing I probably wouldn't last through, either. He says it's a special dispensation that we've got such a nice place to go where there's steam heat, and warm as summer, day and night."
"Nathaniel!" exclaimed his wife, attempting to turn her bulky body toward him in the energy of her protest, "how can you talk so! We've visited Hiram and we know what an awful place he lives in. I keep a-seeing that little narrow room that's to be all the place you and I'll have, with the one window that gets flapped by the wash of the Lord knows who, and that kitchen as big as the closet to my bedroom here, and that long narrow hall—why, it's as much as ever I can walk down that all without sticking fast—and Hiram's queer Dutch wife—"