The day was set, the neighbors responded to the summons, the logs were piled and burnt, and great numbers of the smaller stumps torn out by main force and flung on the piles. David, William and George were among the first on the ground, David bringing four oxen and George and William a yoke each. Before they parted harmony was restored between them and James and Peter and Bertie.
The boys were very solicitous that their grandfather should go out and look at the burn but he was not able. The good old man had been failing since the approach of hot weather and could only work a little while in the garden in the morning; and at evening and during the greater part of the time dozed in his chair. In the midst of wheat harvest there came a week of extremely sultry weather which affected him very sensibly, and as Mrs. Whitman was passing through the room where the old gentleman sat asleep in his chair, she was alarmed by the extreme paleness of his features, went to the chair and found him unconscious. She summoned her husband and children, who were near by reaping, but when they reached the house he was no more. A well-spent life had ceased without a struggle. His death, though not unexpected, threw a gloom over that happy family that not even the assurance of his preparedness could dissipate, and that yielded only to the soothing hand of time.
James, to whom he had stood in the place of a parent, was so affected that for several weeks he could speak of nothing else. Mr. Whitman now conducted family prayers as his father had done, and in a few weeks himself and wife, James and the children, united with the church. As the result of the singing school there was formed a new choir, which Peter, Bertie, and James joined, also Emily Conly, Jane Gifford, Sarah Evans, Maria Whitman, and Prudence Orcutt.
When the boys came to harvest their corn they found an opportunity to sell it in the ear to an agent who was buying corn and shelling it at the mill with a machine that was moved by water-power, and shared forty-nine dollars and fifty cents each. James also obtained eighteen dollars and some cents for that raised on the same piece that he had before planted with potatoes.
The season throughout had been dry and held so, the boys therefore took the oxen, pulled out all the roots the oxen could start by means of their help, and with the axe cut down all the stubs that had been broken off and left. There were also a great many logs that were too green to burn and had been piled up around the stumps; these they hauled together and then setting fire to the corn stubble made a clean burn of weeds, sprouts and logs, feeding the fire till the whole was consumed and a good seed bed made for another year.
Edward Conly kept the school in the winter and everything passed off pleasantly. James was now, as one of the choir, brought to the choir meetings, mingled with the girls as he had never done before, and was even induced by Bertie and Edward Conly to speak a piece and take part in a dialogue at a school exhibition.
The boys resolved this spring (as they had cleared their burn so thoroughly) to plough it a few inches deep and sow it with rye. It was hard work for the cattle, and as they stopped to breathe them, Bertie cried out, in his abrupt fashion,—
“Look here, James; by the time this grain comes off, or not long after, your time will be out, your four years.”
After reflecting a moment, James replied,—
“So they will. Can it be that four years are gone already?”