"Well, me and my wife have concluded that we're too old to transplant--
we don't seem to take root very easy--and we've been thinkin'--would you
swap even, now?"

* * * * *

It must have been a month later that Reuben Gray and his wife were
contentedly sitting in the old familiar kitchen of the little brown
house.

"I've been wondering, Reuben," said his wife--"I've been wondering if
'twouldn't have been just as well if we'd taken some of the good things
while they was goin'--before we got too old to enjoy 'em."

"Yes--peanuts, for instance," acquiesced her husband ruefully.




In the Footsteps of Katy



Only Alma had lived--Alma, the last born. The other five, one after
another, had slipped from loving, clinging arms into the great Silence,
leaving worse than a silence behind them; and neither Nathan Kelsey nor
his wife Mary could have told you which hurt the more,--the saying of a
last good-bye to a stalwart, grown lad of twenty, or the folding of
tiny, waxen hands over a heart that had not counted a year of beating.