It must have been a month later that Reuben Gray and his wife were contentedly sitting in the old familiar kitchen of the little brown house.
“I’ve been wondering, Reuben,” said his wife--“I’ve been wondering if ’twouldn’t have been just as well if we’d taken some of the good things while they was goin’--before we got too old to enjoy ’em.”
“Yes--peanuts, for instance,” acquiesced her husband ruefully.
In the Footsteps of Katy
Only Alma had lived--Alma, the last born. The other five, one after another, had slipped from loving, clinging arms into the great Silence, leaving worse than a silence behind them; and neither Nathan Kelsey nor his wife Mary could have told you which hurt the more,--the saying of a last good-bye to a stalwart, grown lad of twenty, or the folding of tiny, waxen hands over a heart that had not counted a year of beating. Yet both had fallen to their lot.
As for Alma--Alma carried in her dainty self all the love, hopes, tenderness, ambitions, and prayers that otherwise would have been bestowed upon six. And Alma was coming home.
“Mary,” said Nathan one June evening, as he and his wife sat on the back porch, “I saw Jim Hopkins ter-day. Katy’s got home.”
“Hm-m,”--the low rocker swayed gently to and fro,--“Katy’s been ter college, same as Alma, ye know.”
“Yes; an’--an’ that’s what Jim was talkin’ ‘bout He was feelin’ bad-powerful bad.”