"A bonnet she had trimmed herself. I remember watching her, when we
were engaged, making that trimming. You don't see it any more, but
that year all the girls were making it. They made little bunches of
grapes out of dried peas covered with chamois skin--"

"Oh, not really!" ejaculated Anne.

"Indeed, they did. Then they covered their bonnets with them, and
with leaves cut out of the chamois skin. They were charming, too. My
wife wore that bonnet a long time. She trimmed it over and over." He
sighed, but there was a shade of longing as well as pity in his
eyes. "We were young," he said thoughtfully; "I was but twenty-five;
we had our hard times. The babies came pretty fast. Rose wasn't very
strong. I worked too hard, got broken down a little, and expenses
went right on, you know--"

"You bet I know!" Jim said, with his pleasant laugh, and a glance
for Anne.

"Well," said Charles Rideout, looking keenly from one to the other,
"thank God for it, you young people! It never comes back! The days
when you shoulder your troubles cheerfully together,--they come to
their end! And they are"--he shook his head--"they are very
wonderful to look back to! I remember a certain day," he went on
reminiscently, "when we had paid the last of the doctor's bills, and
Rose met me down town for a little celebration. We had had five or
six years of pretty hard sailing then. We bought her new gloves that
day, I remember, and--shoes, I think it was, and I got a hat, and a
book I'd been wanting. We went to a little French restaurant to
dinner, with all our bundles. And that, that, my dear,--"he said,