reach, for you know I was a ready speaker. If my friends could only
have seen that I was peculiarly fitted for public life and advanced
me sufficient means, I would have returned it tenfold. But no; I was
forced into other things for which I had no great aptness or knowledge,
and years of struggling poverty and repeated disappointment followed.
At last your father died and gave us enough to buy a cheap farm out
here. But why go over our experience in the West? My plan of making
sugar from the sorghum, which promised so brilliantly, has ended in
the most wretched failure of all. And now money has gone, health has
gone, and soon my miserable life will be over. Our boy must come back
from college, and you and the two little ones--what will you do?" and
the man covered his head with the blanket and wept aloud. His poor
wife, borne down by the torrent of his sorrow, was on her knees at his
bedside, with her face buried in her hands, weeping also.

But suddenly he started up. His sobs ceased. His tears ceased to flow,
while his eyes grew hard and fierce, and his hands clenched.

"But he was coming," he said. "He may get lost in the storm this bitter
winter night."

He grasped his wife roughly by the arm. She was astonished at his
sudden strength, and raised a tearful, startled face to his. It was
well she could not see its terrible expression in the dusk; but she
shuddered as he hissed in her ear, "If this should happen--if my
miserable death is the cause of his death--if my accursed destiny
involves him, your staff and hope, in so horrible a fate, what have
I to do but curse God and die?"

It seemed to the poor woman that her heart would burst with the agony