earth, I take it. We played together as boys, but I've never presumed on that. His father left him fully two hundred acres of land, mine left me three; but it stood something like a nose on the face of his holding, coming in the south front of it. He seemed to think all he had to do was offer me money for my home; he thought I had no right to love the place where I was born, but that he had. Once or twice I've been on the point of yielding, but never since it became the home of my wife and child."

"That's why, then, he did all he could to keep you from getting the post-office?"

"I reckon so, and now I've got it, he has all his mail sent to Westboro to keep down the receipts."

"Whew—!" whistled 'Lisha. "I didn't think he'd spite himself that far."

"Well," replied Gilbert, "I don't know but at bottom I'm sorry for him. He's got a grand place here, a city home, and money; he's been senator, and, they say, could have been governor; but he's all alone up there without love or kin."

"He had a dreadful pretty wife, and pleasant spoken. I remember selling her quail and partridge every fall of the year."

"Yes; when she first came home, she was not over twenty, and most as pretty as my Mary. He met her when he was travelling in Europe, the Miss Feltons said. She was there learning to sing or something. I heard her sing once up where the end of their garden stops short and the ground drops to my bit. It was just like the voice of the last wood robin that keeps singing till after dark, and then quits sudden as if he was lonesome. After living up there for ten years, she, that at first had a laughing face and skin like a peach, grew thin and white as marble, and then all of a sudden, she left him and died away in England, they say, about a year ago. Some claim he was always reproaching her because she was childless; others, that once when he was away, she went to the midsummer ball up at Felton Manor against his wish and danced with a nephew of Mr. Esterbrook's so beautifully that folks spoke of it until it got round to him. He'd never let her dance before, so nobody knew she could. Then next Sabbath the young man walked from church with her.

"I well remember the day she went, it's less than two years since. There was no running about it; she came down the hill in her carriage as if she was only going on a short journey. As she passed the shop, she plucked the coachman by the coat to stop him and came in to ask me to fit a key to 

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