written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the applause that
greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances, the little dimly-
lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces shining in the light of
the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted Windy running here and there,
talking the jargon of stageland, arraying himself in his motley and
strutting upon the little stage.

"And all winter he did not send me a penny," the sick woman had said,
interrupting his thoughts.

Aroused at last to expression, and filled with the memory of her youth,
the silent woman had talked of her own people. Her father had been killed
in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an anecdote,
touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her son.

The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for an
hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old woman
looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter feel she
had been a fool to come.

At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The story
ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding the woman
alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman, then in her
prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house. The railroad
agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and laughed.

"She knocked him out, too," he said, "knocked him cold upon the ground and
then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town
declaring her the finest woman in the state."