Ma’am Warren’s comments on this action have been embalmed forever in the delighted memories of our people.  We have a taste for picturesque and forceful speech.

From that time we always saw the lunatic and the bent shepherd together.  The older man grew quieter under Lem’s care than he had been for years, and if he felt one of his insane impulses overtaking him, ran totteringly to grasp his protector’s arm until, quaking and shivering, he was himself again.  Lem used to take him up to the sheep-pasture for the day sometimes.  He liked it up there himself, he said, and maybe ’twould be good for Uncle Hi.  He often reported with pride that the old man talked as sensible as anybody, “get him off where it’s quiet.”  Indeed, when Mr. Perkins died, six years later, we had forgotten that he was anything but a little queer, and he had known many happy, lucid hours with his grandchildren.

Susie and Bronson had two boys—­sturdy, hearty children, in whom Lem took the deepest, shyest pride.  He loved to take them off into the woods with him and exulted in their quick intelligence and strong little bodies.  Susie got into the way of letting him take a good deal of the care of them.

It was Lem who first took alarm about the fall that little Frank had, down the cellar stairs.  He hurt his spine somehow—­our local doctor could not tell exactly how—­and as the injury only made him limp a little, nobody thought much about it, until he began to have difficulty in walking.  Then Lem sent for a doctor from Rutland who, as soon as he examined the child, stuck out his lower lip and rubbed his chin ominously.  He pronounced the trouble something with a long name which none of us had ever heard, and said that Frank would be a hopeless cripple if it, were not cured soon.  There was, he said, a celebrated doctor from Europe now traveling in this country who had a wonderful new treatment for this condition.  But under the circumstances—­he looked about the plain farm sitting-room—­he supposed that was out of the question.

“What did the doctor from foreign parts ask?” queried Bronson, and, being informed of some of the customary prices for major operations, fell back hopeless.  Susie, her pretty, childish face drawn and blanched into a wan beauty, put her arms about her sick little son and looked at her stepfather.  He had never failed her.

He did not fail her now.  He sold the land he had accumulated field by field; he sold the great flock of sheep, every one of which he could call by name; he mortgaged the house over the protesting head of his now bedridden mother; he sold the horse and cow, and the very sticks of furniture from the room where Susie had grown up and where the crazy grandfather of Susie’s children had known a peaceful old age and death.  Little Frank was taken to New York to the hospital to have the great surgeon operate on him—­he is there yet, almost completely recovered and nearly ready to come home.