‘TENTY SCRAN’.

  “Patience hath borne the bruise, and I the stroke.”

“I think she’s a-sinkin’, Doctor,” sobbed old Aunt Rhody, the nurse, as she came out of Mary Scranton’s bed-room into the clean kitchen, where Doctor Parker sat before the fire, a hand on either knee, staring at the embers, and looking very grave.

Doctor Parker got up from the creaky chair, and went into the bed-room.  It was very small, very clean, and two sticks of wood on the old iron dogs burned away gradually, and softened the cool April air.

Before this pretence of a fire sat an elderly woman, with grave, set features, an expression of sense and firmness, but a keen dark eye that raised question of her temper.  Miss Lovina Perkins was her style, being half-aunt to the unpleasant-colored baby she now tended, rolled up in a flannel shawl, and permitted to be stupid undisturbedly, since its mother was dying.

Dying, evidently; she had not been conscious for several hours.  Her baby had not had its welcome; she knew nothing, cared for nothing, felt nothing but the chill of the blood that stood still in her veins, and the choking of the heart that hardly beat.

Poor child! poor widow!  Her head lay on the pillow, white as the linen, but of a different tint,—­the indescribable pallor that you know and I know, who have seen it drawn over a dear face,—­a tint that is best unknown, that cannot be reproduced by pen or pencil.  Yet, for all its pallor, you saw at once that this face was still young, had been lovely, a true New-England beauty, quaint and trim and delicate as the slaty-gray snow-bird, with its white breast, and soft, bright eyes, that haunts the dusky fir-trees and dazzling hill-side slopes when no other bird dare show itself,—­a quiet, shy creature, full of innocent trust and endurance, its chirp and low repetition dearer than the gay song of lark or robin, because a wintry song.

But Mary Perkins had never been called handsome in Deerfield; if they said she was “a real pretty girl,” it only meant kindly and gentle, in the Connecticut vernacular; and Tom Scranton, the village joiner, was first to find out that the delicate, oval face, with its profuse brown hair, its mild hazel eyes, and smiling mouth, was “jest like a pictur’.”  So Tom and Mary duly fell in love, got married,—­nobody objecting,—­went West, and eight months afterward Mary came home with a coffin.  Tom had fallen from a ladder, been taken up and brought home dead, and she had travelled back five hundred miles to bury him in Deerfield, beside his father and mother; for he was their only son.

There were about a hundred dollars left for Mary.  She could not work now, and she went to board with her half-sister, the Deerfield tailoress.