see the isolated life these two led in the family. The boys were good,
sturdy, noisy boys. They went to school in the winter and worked on the
farm in the summer, like all farmers' boys. Reuben, the oldest, was
eighteen when Draxy was ten; he was hired, by a sort of indenture, for
three years, on a neighboring farm, and came home only on alternate
Sundays. Jamie, and Sam, and Lawton were at home; young as they were, they
did men's service in many ways. Jamie had a rare gift for breaking horses,
and for several years the only ready money which the little farm had
yielded was the price of the colts which Jamie raised and trained so
admirably that they sold well. The other two boys were strong and willing,
but they had none of their father's spirituality, or their mother's
gentleness. Thus, in spite of Reuben Miller's deep love for his children,
he was never at ease in his boys' presence; and, as they grew older,
nothing but the influence of their mother's respect for their father
prevented their having an impatient contempt for his unlikeness to the
busy, active, thrifty farmers of the neighborhood.

It was a strange picture that the little kitchen presented on a winter
evening. Reuben sat always on the left hand of the big fire-place, with a
book on his knees. Draxy was curled up on an old-fashioned cherry-wood
stand close to his chair, but so high that she rested her little dimpled
chin on his head. A tallow candle stood on a high bracket, made from a
fungus which Reuben had found in the woods. When the candle flared and
dripped, Draxy sprang up on the stand, and, poised on one foot, reached
over her father's head to snuff it. She looked like a dainty fairy
half-floating in the air, but nobody knew it. Jane sat in a high-backed
wooden rocking-chair, which had a flag bottom and a ruffled calico
cushion, and could only rock a very few inches back and forth, owing to
the loss of half of one of the rockers. For the first part of the evening,
Jane always knitted; but by eight o'clock the hands relaxed, the needles