kindest husband and most indulgent father that ever lived; for that’s women’s style: they’re unreasoning creatures.

“Along towards morning we persuaded Mrs. Jedwort, who had been up all night, to lie down a spell and catch a little rest, while Maria and I sat up and watched with the old man. All was still except our whispers and his heavy breathing; there was a lamp burning in the next room; when all of a sudden a light shone into the windows, and about the same time we heard a roaring and crackling sound. We looked out, and saw the night all lighted up as if by some great fire. As it appeared to be on the other side of the house, we ran to the door, and there what did we see but the old meeting-house all in flames. Some fellows had set fire to it to spite Jedwort. It must have been burning some time inside, for when we looked out the flames had burst through the roof.

“As the night was perfectly still, except a light wind blowing away from the other buildings on the place, we raised no alarm, but just stood in the door and saw it burn. And a glad sight it was to us, you may be sure. I just held Maria close to my side, and told her that all was well—it was the best thing that could happen. ‘Oh yes,’ says she, ‘it seems to me as though a kind Providence was burning up his sin and shame out of our sight.’

“I had never yet said anything to her about marriage—for the time to come at that had never seemed to arrive; but there’s nothing like a little excitement to bring things to a focus. You’ve seen water in a tumbler just at the freezing-point, but not exactly able to make up its mind to freeze, when a little jar will set the crystals forming, and in a minute what was liquid is ice. It was the shock of events that night that touched my life into crystals—not of ice, gentlemen, by any manner of means.

“After the fire had got along so far that the meeting-house was a gone case, an alarm was given, probably by the very fellows that set it, and a hundred people were on the spot before the thing had done burning.

“Of course these circumstances put an end to the breaking up of the family. Dave was sent for, and came home. Then as soon as we saw that the old man’s brain was injured so that he wasn’t likely to recover his mind, the boys and I went to work and put that farm through a course of improvement it would have done your eyes good to see. The children were sent to school, and Mrs. Jedwort had all the money she wanted now to clothe them, and to provide the house with comforts, without stealing her own butter. Jedwort was a burden; but, in spite of him, that was just about the happiest family for the next four years that ever lived on this planet.

“Jedwort soon got his bodily health, but I don’t think he knew one of us again after his hurt. As near as I could get at his state of mind, he thought he had been changed into some sort of animal. He seemed inclined to take me for a master, and for four years he followed me around like a dog. During that time he never spoke, but only whined and growled. When I said, ‘Lie down,’ he’d lie down; and when I whistled he’d come.

“I used sometimes to make him work; and certain simple things he would do very well as long as I was by. One day I had a jag of hay to get in; and, as the boys were away, I thought I’d have him load it. I pitched it on to the waggon about where it ought to lie, and looked to him only to pack it down. There turned out to be a bigger load than I had expected, and the higher it got the worse the shape of it, till finally, as I was starting it towards the barn, off it rolled, and the old man with it, head foremost.

“He struck a stone heap, and for a moment I thought he was killed. But he jumped up and spoke for the first time. ‘I’ll blow it,’ says he, finishing the sentence he had begun four years before, when he called for the horn to be passed up to him.

“I couldn’t have been much more astonished if one of the horses had spoken. But I saw at once that there was an expression in Jedwort’s face that hadn’t been there since his tumble in the belfry; and I knew that, as his wits had been knocked out of him by one blow on the head, so another blow had knocked ’em in again.