For three months this hard labor was performed; but not without a visible effect.  The face of Mrs. Carroll grew thinner; her step lost its lightness; and her voice its cheerful tone.  All this her husband saw, and saw with intense pain.  But, there was no remedy.  His income was but three hundred dollars a year; and out of that small sum it was impossible to pay one hundred for the wages and board of a girl, and have enough left for the plainest food and clothing.  There was, therefore, no alternative.  All that it was in his power to do, was done by Mr. Carroll to lighten the heavy burdens under which his wife was sinking; but it was only a little, in reality, that he could do; and he was doomed to see her daily wasting away, and her strength departing from her.

At the time we have introduced them, Mrs. Carroll had begun to show some symptoms of failing health, that alarmed her husband seriously.  She had taken cold, which was followed by a dry, fatiguing cough, and a more than usual prostration of strength.  On coming in with her bucket of water from the well, as just mentioned, she did not take off her shoes, and brush away the snow that had been pressed in around the tops against her stockings, but suffered it to lie there and melt, thus wetting her feet.  It was nearly an hour from the time Mr. Carroll came down from his room, before supper was ready.  Aggy was, by this time, asleep; so that the mother could pour out the tea without having, as was usually the case, to hold the baby in her arms.

“Ain’t you going to eat anything?” asked Mr. Carroll, seeing that his wife, whose face looked flushed, only sipped a little tea.

“I don’t feel any appetite,” replied Mrs. Carroll.

“But you’d better try to eat something, dear.”

Just then there was a knock at the door.  On opening it, Mr. Carroll found a messenger with a request for him to go and see a parishioner who was ill.

“You can’t go away there in this storm,” said his wife, as soon as the messenger had retired.

“It’s full a mile off.”

“I must go, Edith,” replied the minister.  “If the distance were many miles instead of one, it would be all the same.  Duty calls.”

And out into the driving storm the minister went, and toiled on his lonely way through the deep snow to reach the bedside of a suffering fellow man, who sought spiritual consolation in the hour of sickness, from one whose temporal wants he had, while in health, shown but little inclination to supply.  That consolation offered, he turned his face homeward again, and again breasted the unabated storm.  He found his wife in bed—­something unusual for her at ten o’clock—­and, on laying his hand upon her face, discovered that she was in a high fever.  In alarm, he went for the doctor, who declined going out, but sent medicine, and promised to come over in the morning.

In the morning Mrs. Carroll was much worse, and unable to rise.  To dress the children and get breakfast, Mr. Carroll found to be tasks of no very easy performance for him; and as soon as they were completed, he called in a neighbor to stay with his wife while he went in search of some one to come and take her place in the family until she was able to go about again as usual.