"Where can he be, gran—" The words were arrested on Billy's lips. Farmer Ellery entered the room and motioned to him to keep still. A woman who followed him led granny tenderly into the next room, while outside the door Billy heard muffled voices and many footsteps.
A moment later how his blood seemed to freeze with horror! The door opened, and sad-faced men brought in, on a plank torn from the old bridge, Peter, the tailor, dead. His pallid face gleamed through the matted hair, the water dripped from his clothing, and clutched tightly to his breast was poor little Ben. The child's soft locks streaming back showed the sweet face that looked to Billy like an angel's, so pure was it now. The patient little helper! Billy burst into tears. He forgot the stuttering, the baby pinafore, the copper-toed shoes that used to make Ben so funny. He all at once remembered how he gave himself so lovingly to everybody's service—to his, to granny's, to the miserable father's, even unto death. It seemed as if Billy must get him back, if only to tell him how much he loved him. But that could not be ever again.
Farmer Ellery and the other kind neighbors made every effort to restore the two to consciousness, but all was of no avail. They could only keep the sad condition of things from the poor old woman until morning, and then vie with one another in bringing her comforts.
The next few days were very strange ones to Billy. He never forgot an hour of that morning when he sat on the door-step in the warm sunshine, and peeped every now and then into the cottage, where, on the old lounge, made white with snowy linen, was a child, strewn from head to foot with apple-blossoms.
"He was not great, or handsome, or very smart," thought Billy, "but he will be missed, for he was good, and he loved everybody. He was always ready and willing to help, or to do, or to suffer. He was worth twice as much as I am. Nothing is left for me but granny. I'll have to make up to her the loss of both of them."
Suddenly there came into Billy's mind the thought of his chosen occupation. Was he not to start out as a minstrel that very week?
I doubt if Billy had ever thought so much in all his life before as he did in the days that lay between the time when little Ben was brought home so cold and white, and the funeral, when the kind neighbors buried him away out of sight under the green sod. He seemed to be taking a new view of life altogether. He could not have told the reason why, but the idea of starting off with the minstrel troup seemed to lose its fascination. He would have to leave that little green mound behind him, and he did not want to do it.
It was two days after the funeral when, as Farmer Ellery was at work in his field, there appeared quite unexpectedly a red head over the fence near him, and then a boy with a very earnest face.
"Good-day, Billy. Going to leave us, I hear."
"No, sir. I have come to say I want to make a man of myself by being just a hard-working boy, if you will show me how. And could I work for enough to keep an old lady, do you think? I am going to keep her, anyhow. The town shan't have granny. I am sorry I refused your offer. That minstrel nonsense is no go for me."