remembered Billy Jacobs distinctly, except his widow, who lived in a poor little house on the outskirts of the town, her only income being that derived from the renting of the large house, in which she had once lived in comfort with her husband and son.  The house was a double house; and for a few years Billy Jacobs’s twin brother, a sea captain, had lived in the other half of it.  But Mrs. Billy could not abide Mrs. John, and so with a big heart wrench the two brothers, who loved each other as only twin children can love, had separated.  Captain John took his wife and went to sea again.  The ship was never heard of, and to the day of Billy Jacobs’s death he never forgave his wife.  In his heart he looked upon her as his brother’s murderer.  Very much like the perpetual presence of a ghost under her roof it must have been to the woman also, the unbroken silence of those untenanted rooms, and that never opened door on the left side of her hall, which she must pass whenever she went in or out of her house.  There were those who said that she was never seen to look towards that door; and that whenever a noise, as of a rat in the wall, or a blind creaking in the wind, came from that side of the house, Mrs. Billy turned white, and shuddered.  Well she might.  It is a fearful thing to have lying on one’s heart in this life the consciousness that one has been ever so innocently the occasion, if not the cause, of a fellow-creature’s turning aside into the path which was destined to take him to his death.

The very next day after Billy Jacobs’s funeral, his widow left the house.  She sold all the furniture, except what was absolutely necessary for a very meagre outfitting of the little cottage into which she moved.  The miserly habit of her husband seemed to have suddenly fallen on her like a mantle.  Her life shrank and dwindled in every possible way; she almost starved herself and her boy, although the rent of her old homestead was quite enough to make them comfortable.  In a few years, to complete the poor woman’s misery, her son ran away and went to sea.  The sea-farer’s stories which his Uncle John had told him, when he was a little child, had never left his mind; and the drearier his mother made life for him on land, the more longingly he dwelt on his fancies of life at sea, till at last, when he was only fifteen, he disappeared one day, leaving a note, not for his mother, but for his Sunday-school teacher,—­the only human being he loved.  This young woman carried the note to Mrs. Jacobs.  She read it, made no comment, and handed it back.  Her visitor was chilled and terrified by her manner.

“Can I do any thing for you, Mrs. Jacobs?” she said.  “I do assure you I sympathize with you most deeply.  I think the boy will soon come back.  He will find the sea life very different from what he has dreamed.”