Two hermit thrushes, distant in the forest, began to send up their poignant antiphonal evening chant.

THE HEYDAY OF THE BLOOD

The older professor looked up at the assistant, fumbling fretfully with a pile of papers.  “Farrar, what’s the matter with you lately?” he said sharply.

The younger man started, “Why...why...” the brusqueness of the other’s manner shocked him suddenly into confession.  “I’ve lost my nerve, Professor Mallory, that’s what the matter with me.  I’m frightened to death,” he said melodramatically.

“What of?” asked Mallory, with a little challenge in his tone.

The flood-gates were open.  The younger man burst out in exclamations, waving his thin, nervous, knotted fingers, his face twitching as he spoke.  “Of myself...no, not myself, but my body!  I’m not well...I’m getting worse all the time.  The doctors don’t make out what is the matter...I don’t sleep ...  I worry...I forget things, I take no interest in life...the doctors intimate a nervous breakdown ahead of me...and yet I rest ...  I rest...more than I can afford to!  I never go out.  Every evening I’m in bed by nine o’clock.  I take no part in college life beyond my work, for fear of the nervous strain.  I’ve refused to take charge of that summer-school in New York, you know, that would be such an opportunity for me ... if I could only sleep!  But though I never do anything exciting in the evening ... heavens! what nights I have.  Black hours of seeing myself in a sanitarium, dependent on my brother!  I never ... why, I’m in hell ... that’s what the matter with me, a perfect hell of ignoble terror!”

He sat silent, his drawn face turned to the window.  The older man looked at him speculatively.  When he spoke it was with a cheerful, casual quality in his voice which made the other look up at him surprised.

“You don’t suppose those great friends of yours, the nerve specialists, would object to my telling you a story, do you?  It’s very quiet and unexciting.  You’re not too busy?”

“Busy!  I’ve forgotten the meaning of the word!  I don’t dare to be!”

“Very well, then; I mean to carry you back to the stony little farm in the Green Mountains, where I had the extreme good luck to be born and raised.  You’ve heard me speak of Hillsboro; and the story is all about my great-grandfather, who came to live with us when I was a little boy.”

“Your great-grandfather?” said the other incredulously.  “People don’t remember their great-grandfathers!”

“Oh, yes, they do, in Vermont.  There was my father on one farm, and my grandfather on another, without a thought that he was no longer young, and there was ‘gran’ther’ as we called him, eighty-eight years old and just persuaded to settle back, let his descendants take care of him, and consent to be an old man.  He had been in the War of 1812—­think of that, you mushroom!—­and had lost an arm and a good deal of his health there.  He had lately begun to get a pension of twelve dollars a month, so that for an old man he was quite independent financially, as poor Vermont farmers look at things; and he was a most extraordinary character, so that his arrival in our family was quite an event.