to his decision.  Almost every day, somebody would call out, at recess or intermission, ’Well, I’ll leave it to Nat’—­or ‘I’ll tell Nat.’  One day somebody shouted, ’Take it before the king—­let’s call him King Nat.’  But it almost made Nat cry.  He exclaimed, ‘Oh, boys, please don’t ever say that again;’ and they never did.  He had a great deal more influence over them than any teacher.  He could make them do anything.  Sometimes the teachers themselves used to come to him privately and tell him of things they did not like, which the boys were getting into the way of doing, and ask him to try to stop them.  If Nat had not been a saint, as I said before, all this would have spoiled him; but he never thought of its being any special power in him.  He used to think it was only because the boys were so kind-hearted that they could not bear to refuse any request which a poor cripple made.

“When I think how happy those days were and how fast the darkest days of our lives were drawing near, it makes me shrink from happiness almost as much as from grief.  It seems only grief’s forerunner.  On the evening of my sixteenth birthday, we were all having a very merry time in papa’s study, popping corn over the open fire.  We had wheeled Nat near the fire, and tied the corn-popper on a broom-handle, so that he could shake the popper himself; and I never saw him laugh so heartily at anything.  Papa laughed too, quite loud, which was a thing that did not happen many times a year.  It was the last time we heard the full sound of dear papa’s voice.  Late that night he was called out to see a poor man, one of the factory operatives, who was dying.  It was a terrible snow-storm, and papa had been so heated over the fire and in playing with us that he took a severe cold.  The next morning he could not speak aloud.  The doctor said it was an acute bronchitis and would pass off; but it did not, and in a very few weeks it was clear that he was dying of consumption.  Probably the cold only developed a disease which had been long there.

“I can’t tell you about the last months of papa’s life.  I think I shall never be able to speak of them.  We saw much worse days afterward, but none that seemed to me so hard to bear; even when I thought Nat and I would have to go to the almshouse it was not so hard.  The love which most children divide between father and mother I concentrated on my father.  I loved him with an adoration akin to that which a woman feels for her husband, and with the utmost of filial love added.  Nat loved him almost as much.  The most touching thing I ever saw was to see Nat from his wagon, or wheeled chair, reaching out to take care of papa in the bed.  Nobody else could give him his medicine so well; nobody could prepare his meals for him, after he was too weak to use a knife and fork, so well as Nat.  How he could do all this with only one hand—­for he could not bend himself in his chair enough to use the hand farthest from the bed—­nobody could understand; but he did, and the very last mouthful of wine papa swallowed he took, the morning he died, from poor Nat’s brave little hand, which did not shake nor falter, though the tears were rolling down his cheeks.