home. Thither he carries his diurnal dollar, when he can get it, and
on it they all manage to live and grow fat. He loses time
occasionally, it is true, through illness, but no such trifling
misfortune can induce him, seemingly, to take a long, anxious look
into the future. Only once--it was last winter--have I seen him
dismayed by the frowning fates. The doctor thought his wife would die,
and they had nothing to eat in the house. When Abraham appeared before
me at that time, "his countenance was fallen," as the quaint, strong
language of Scripture expresses it. He made no complaints, however,
and indulged in no Byronic allusions to destiny. Indeed, he said very
little, but merely drooped and cowered, as if the wolf at the door and
the shadow of death within it were rather more than he could face at
one and the same time. It soon became evident, however, that his wife
would "pull through," as he said, and then the wolf didn't trouble him
a mite. He installed himself as cook, nurse, and house man-of-all-
work, finding also abundant leisure to smoke his pipe with
infinite content. One morning he was seen baking buckwheat cakes for
the children; each one in turn received an allowance on a tin plate,
and squatted here and there on the floor to devour it; and, from the
master of ceremonies down, there was not an indication that all was
not just as it should be. A few days later I met him coming back to
his work with his pipe in the corner of his mouth, and the old
confident twinkle in his eye as he said, "Mornin', Bossie." Now,
Abraham carries his peculiar characteristics into grubbing. If I
should set him at a hundred-acre field full of stumps and stones, and
tell him to clear it to the depth of two feet, he would begin without
any apparent misgiving, and with no more thought for the magnitude of
his task than he has for the tangled and stubborn mysteries of life in
general, or the dubious question of "what shall be on the morrow" in
his own experience. He would see only the little strip that he