discouragement and hardship of life.

Jane, too, mourned her boys not as mothers mourn whose sons have a
birthright of gladness. Jane was very tired of the world.

Draxy was saddened by the strange, solemn presence of death. But her
brothers had not been her companions. She began suddenly to feel a sense
of new and greater relationship to them, now that she thought of them as
angels; she was half terrified and bewildered at the feeling that now, for
the first time, they were near to her.

On the evening after Sam's funeral, as Reuben was sitting on the store
steps, with his head buried in his hands, a neighbor drove up and threw
him a letter.

"It's been lyin' in the office a week or more, Merrill said, and he
reckoned I'd better bring it up to you," he called out, as he drove on.

"It might lie there forever, for all my goin' after it," thought Reuben to
himself, as he picked it up from the dust; "it's no good news, I'll be
bound."

But it was good news. The letter was from Jane's oldest sister, who had
married only a few years before, and gone to live in a sea-port town on
the New England coast. Her husband was an old captain, who had retired
from his seafaring life with just money enough to live on, in a very
humble way, in an old house which had belonged to his grandfather. He had
lost two wives; his children were all married or dead, and in his
loneliness and old age he had taken for his third wife the gentle, quiet
elder sister who had brought up Jane Miller. She was a gray-haired,