Stephen,

  Son of Philemon and Agatha Webb,

  Died, Aged Six Weeks.

  God be merciful to me a sinner!

“Now what does that mean?  Did you ever hear anyone say?”

“No,” was his old wife’s answer.  “Perhaps she was one of those Calvinist folks who believe babies go to hell if they are not baptised.”

“But her children were all baptised.  I’ve been told so; some of them before she was well out of her bed.  ’God be merciful to me a sinner!’ And the chick not six weeks old!  Something queer about that, dame, if it did happen more than thirty years ago.”

“What did you see over the grave of the child who was killed in her arms by lightning?”

“This: 

“‘And he was not, for God took him.’”

Farmer Waite had but one word to say: 

“She came to me when my Sissy had the smallpox; the only person in town who would enter my doors.  More than that; when Sissy was up and I went to pay the doctor’s bill I found it had been settled.  I did not know then who had enough money and compassion to do this for me; now I do.”

Many an act of kindness which had been secretly performed in that town during the last twenty years came to light on that day, the most notable of which was the sending of a certain young lad to school and his subsequent education as a minister.

But other memories of a sweeter and more secret nature still came up likewise, among them the following: 

A young girl, who was of a very timid but deeply sensitive nature, had been urged into an engagement with a man she did not like.  Though the conflict this occasioned her and the misery which accompanied it were apparent to everybody, nobody stirred in her behalf but Agatha.  She went to see her, and, though it was within a fortnight of the wedding, she did not hesitate to advise the girl to give him up, and when the poor child said she lacked the courage, Agatha herself went to the man and urged him into a display of generosity which saved the poor, timid thing from a life of misery.  They say this was no easy task for Agatha, and that the man was sullen for a year.  But the girl’s gratitude was boundless.

Of her daring, which was always on the side of right and justice, the stories were numerous; so were the accounts, mostly among the women, of her rare tenderness and sympathy for the weak and the erring.  Never was a man talked to as she talked to Jake Cobleigh the evening after he struck his mother, and if she had been in town on the day when Clarissa Mayhew ran away with that Philadelphia adventurer many said it would never have happened, for no girl could stand the admonition, or resist the pleading, of this childless mother.

It was reserved for Mr. Halliday and Mr. Sutherland to talk of her mental qualities.  Her character was so marked and her manner so simple that few gave attention to the intellect that was the real basis of her power.  The two mentioned gentlemen, however, appreciated her to the full, and it was while listening to their remarks that Frederick was suddenly startled by some one saying to him: