with his feelings and fortune. He is going home, yet the thought brings no
assurance of welcome and comfort. As he cowers upon the seat of his market
wagon, he is to the reader what he is in the fading light--a mere dim outline
of a man. His progress is so slow that there will be plenty of time to relate
some facts about him which will make the scenes and events to follow more
intelligible.

James Holcroft is a middle-aged man and the owner of a small, hilly farm. He
had inherited his rugged acres from his father, had always lived upon them,
and the feeling had grown strong with the lapse of time that he could live
nowhere else. Yet he knew that he was, in the vernacular of the region,
"going down-hill." The small savings of years were slowly melting away, and
the depressing feature of this truth was that he did not see how he could help
himself. He was not a sanguine man, but rather one endowed with a hard,
practical sense which made it clear that the down-hill process had only to
continue sufficiently long to leave him landless and penniless. It was all so
distinct on this dismal evening that he groaned aloud.

"If it comes to that, I don't know what I'll do--crawl away on a night like
this and give up, like enough."

Perhaps he was right. When a man with a nature like his "gives up," the end
has come. The low, sturdy oaks that grew so abundantly along the road were
types of his character--they could break, but not bend. He had little
suppleness, little power to adapt himself to varied conditions of life. An
event had occurred a year since, which for months, he could only contemplate
with dull wonder and dismay. In his youth he had married the daughter of a
small farmer. Like himself, she had always been accustomed to toil and frugal
living. From childhood she had been impressed with the thought that parting
with a dollar was a serious matter, and to save a dollar one of the good deeds