His wife stared at him, amazement silencing her.

“I thought it was the only thing left I could do for you, Matey, to let you stay there.  You know I never wished for anything but that you should have what you wanted.”  He had spoken in a steady, even tone, which now broke into an irrepressible wail of selfish, human anguish.  “But you leave me all alone, Matey!  How can I get on without you!  I thought I’d die myself as I sat inside the house watching you.  You’re all I ever had, Matey!  All there has ever been in the world for me!”

The old woman stopped her gasping by a superhuman effort.  “Why, Natty, I never supposed you thought so much of me still.  I thought that had gone when we got old.  But, oh, my dear!  I’m afraid I’ve dragged you down with me to destruction.  It wa’n’t any matter about me, but I’m afraid you’ve lost your soul.  That was a wicked thing for us to do!”

Her husband lifted his tear-stained, old face and laid it on the pillow beside her.  He did not put his arms about her, as a younger lover or one of another country might have done, but because he was a man who had loved deeply all his life, his answer came with the solemn significance and sincerity of a speech before the Judgment Seat.  “I ain’t afraid of hell if you’re there, Matey,” he said.

His wife turned her head and looked at him, her whole face transfigured.  She was no longer a fat old woman on her deathbed.  Before his very eyes she grew again to be the girl among the currant bushes, and with the same amazed intonation of incredulous joy she cried his name aloud.  “Oh, Nathaniel!” she said, and with the word the longed for Finis was written to her life.

A VILLAGE MUNCHAUSEN

I

When I was a little girl, and lived in Hillsboro with my grandparents, there were two Decoration Days in every year.  One was when all we school-children took flowers put to the cemetery and decorated the graves of the soldiers; and the other was when the peonies and syringas bloomed, and grandfather and I went alone to put a bouquet on the grave of old Jedediah Chillingworth.

Grandfather did this as a sort of penance for a great mistake he had made, and I think it was with the idea of making an atonement by confession that he used always to tell me the story of his relations with the old man.  At any rate, he started his narrative when we left the house and began to walk out to the cemetery, and ended it as he laid the flowers on the neglected grave.  I trotted along beside him, faster and faster as he grew more and more interested, and then stood breathless on the other side of the grave as he finished, in his cracked old voice, harsh with emotion.

The first part of his story happened a very long time ago, even before grandfather was born, when Jedediah Chillingworth first began to win for himself the combination title of town-fool and town-liar.  By the time grandfather was a half-grown boy, big enough to join in the rough crowd of village lads who tormented Jed, the old dizzard had been for years the local butt.  Of course I never saw him, but I have keard so much about him from all the gossips in the village, and grandfather used to describe him so vividly, that I feel as if I know all about him.