mother lay thinking of him, but to try instead to get her to talk
about him. I did not see how this could make her the merry mother
she used to be, but I was told that if I could not do it nobody
could, and this made me eager to begin. At first, they say, I was
often jealous, stopping her fond memories with the cry, 'Do you
mind nothing about me?' but that did not last; its place was taken
by an intense desire (again, I think, my sister must have breathed
it into life) to become so like him that even my mother should not
see the difference, and many and artful were the questions I put to
that end. Then I practised in secret, but after a whole week had
passed I was still rather like myself. He had such a cheery way of
whistling, she had told me, it had always brightened her at her
work to hear him whistling, and when he whistled he stood with his
legs apart, and his hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers. I
decided to trust to this, so one day after I had learned his
whistle (every boy of enterprise invents a whistle of his own) from
boys who had been his comrades, I secretly put on a suit of his
clothes, dark grey they were, with little spots, and they fitted me
many years afterwards, and thus disguised I slipped, unknown to the
others, into my mother's room. Quaking, I doubt not, yet so
pleased, I stood still until she saw me, and then - how it must
have hurt her! 'Listen!' I cried in a glow of triumph, and I
stretched my legs wide apart and plunged my hands into the pockets
of my knickerbockers, and began to whistle.

She lived twenty-nine years after his death, such active years
until toward the end, that you never knew where she was unless you
took hold of her, and though she was frail henceforth and ever
growing frailer, her housekeeping again became famous, so that
brides called as a matter of course to watch her ca'ming and