At a short distance from him, in an ancient straight-backed rocking-chair, dark with age, and clumsy in its antique carvings, sat his wife.  Stiffly upright, and with an almost painful primness in dress and figure, she sat knitting rapidly and with closed eyes.  Her face was rigid as a mask; the motion in her fingers, as she plied her needles, was spasmodic and machine-like; the figure, though quiet, wore an air of iron repose that was most uneasy and unnatural.  Still, through the mask and from the figure there stole the aspect and air of one who had within her deep wells of sweetness and love which only strong training or power of education had thus covered up and obscured.  She looked of that stern Puritanical stock whose iron will conquered the severity of New England winters and overcame the stubbornness of its granite hills, and whose idea of a perfect life consisted in the rigorous discharge of all Christian duties, and the banishment, forever and at all times, of the levity of pleasure and the folly of amusement.  She could have walked, if need were, with composure to the stake; but she could neither have joined in a game at cards, nor have entered into a romp with little children.  All this was plainly to be seen in the stern repose of her countenance and the stiff harshness of her figure.

Upon the stained deal table, standing a little in the rear and partially between the two, reposed an open Bible.  Between its leaves lay a pair of large, old-fashioned, silver-bowed spectacles, which the husband had but recently laid there, after reading the usual daily chapter of Holy Writ.  He had ceased but a moment before, and had laid them down with a heavy sigh, for his heart to-day was sorely oppressed; and no wonder; for, following his gaze around the room, we find upon the otherwise bare walls five sad mementos of those who had “gone before,”—­five coarse and unartistic, but loving tributes to the dead.

There they hang, framed in black, each with its white tomb and overhanging willow, and severally inscribed to the memories of Mark, John, James, Martha, and Mary Newell.  All their flock.  None left to honor and obey, none to cheer, none to lighten the labor or soothe the cares.  All gone, and these two left behind to travel hand in hand, but desolate, though together, to the end of their earthly pilgrimage.

There had, indeed, been one other, but for him there hung no loving memorial.  He was the youngest of all, and such a noble, strong, and lusty infant, that the father, in the pride of his heart, and with his fondness for Scriptural names, had christened him Samson.  He, too, had gone; but in the dread gallery that hung about the room there was no framed funereal picture “To the Memory of Samson Newell.”  If in the tomb of his father’s or mother’s heart he lay buried, no outward token gave note thereof.