'Snow, mother? And we only yet in September?'

'All seasons are alike to me,' she returned, with a grim kind of
luxuriousness. 'I know nothing of summer and winter, shut up here.

The Lord has been pleased to put me beyond all that.' With her
cold grey eyes and her cold grey hair, and her immovable face, as
stiff as the folds of her stony head-dress,--her being beyond the
reach of the seasons seemed but a fit sequence to her being beyond
the reach of all changing emotions.

On her little table lay two or three books, her handkerchief, a
pair of steel spectacles newly taken off, and an old-fashioned gold
watch in a heavy double case. Upon this last object her son's eyes
and her own now rested together.

'I see that you received the packet I sent you on my father's
death, safely, mother.'

'You see.'

'I never knew my father to show so much anxiety on any subject, as
that his watch should be sent straight to you.'

'I keep it here as a remembrance of your father.'

'It was not until the last, that he expressed the wish; when he
could only put his hand upon it, and very indistinctly say to me
"your mother." A moment before, I thought him wandering in his