The old man stirred uneasily in his chair.  “I dun’no’—­seems sometimes to me as though I’d ruther have winter come and be done with it.  If we’ve got to go as soon as cold weather sets in, we might as well go and have it over with.  As ’tis, I keep on saying good-by in my mind to things and folks every minute, and then get up in the morning to begin it all again.  This afternoon I was down the river where I saved Hiram’s life when he was a little fellow—­the old black whirl-hole.  I got to thinking about that time, I never was real sure till then I wouldn’t be a coward if it come right down to it.  Seems as though I’d been more of a man ever since.  It’s been a real comfort to me to look at that whirl-hole, and that afternoon it come over me that after this there wouldn’t be a single thing any more to remind us of anything good or bad, we’ve ever done.  It’ll be most as if we hadn’t lived at all.  I just felt as though I couldn’t go away from everything and everybody I’ve ever known down to Hiram’s stuffy little flat.  And yet I suppose we are real lucky to have such a good son as Hiram now the others are all gone.  I dun’no’ what we’d do if ’tweren’t for him.”

“Do!” cried his wife bitterly.  “We could go on living right in this valley where we belong, if ’twas only in the poor-house!”

The old man answered reasonably, as though trying to convince himself, “Well, I suppose it’s really flying in the face of Providence to feel so.  The doctor says your lungs ain’t strong enough to stand another of our winters in the mountains, fussing over stove fires, and zero weather and all, and I’m so ailing I probably wouldn’t last through, either.  He says it’s a special dispensation that we’ve got such a nice place to go where there’s steam heat, and warm as summer, day and night.”

“Nathaniel!” exclaimed his wife, attempting to turn her bulky body toward him in the energy of her protest, “how can you talk so!  We’ve visited Hiram and we know what an awful place he lives in.  I keep a-seeing that little narrow room that’s to be all the place you and I’ll have, with the one window that gets flapped by the wash of the Lord knows who, and that kitchen as big as the closet to my bedroom here, and that long narrow hall—­why, it’s as much as ever I can walk down that all without sticking fast—­and Hiram’s queer Dutch wife—­”

She stopped, silenced by the scantiness of her vocabulary, but through her mind still whirled wordless outcries of rebellion.  Her one brief visit to the city rose before her with all the horror of the inexplicable, strange, and repellent life which it had revealed to her.  The very conveniences of the compact city apartment were included in her revulsion from all that it meant.  The very kindnesses of the pretty, plump German woman who was her daughter-in-law startled and repelled her, as did the familiar, easy, loud-voiced affection of the blond young German-Americans who were her grandchildren.  Even her own son, Hiram, become half Teutonic through the influence of his business and social relations among the Germans, seemed alien and remote to her.  The stout, beer-drinking, good-natured and easygoing man seemed another person from the shy, stiff lad who had gone away from them many years ago, looking so like his father at nineteen that his mother choked to see him.