well.  The other two boys were strong and willing, but they had none of their father’s spirituality, or their mother’s gentleness.  Thus, in spite of Reuben Miller’s deep love for his children, he was never at ease in his boys’ presence; and, as they grew older, nothing but the influence of their mother’s respect for their father prevented their having an impatient contempt for his unlikeness to the busy, active, thrifty farmers of the neighborhood.

It was a strange picture that the little kitchen presented on a winter evening.  Reuben sat always on the left hand of the big fire-place, with a book on his knees.  Draxy was curled up on an old-fashioned cherry-wood stand close to his chair, but so high that she rested her little dimpled chin on his head.  A tallow candle stood on a high bracket, made from a fungus which Reuben had found in the woods.  When the candle flared and dripped, Draxy sprang up on the stand, and, poised on one foot, reached over her father’s head to snuff it.  She looked like a dainty fairy half-floating in the air, but nobody knew it.  Jane sat in a high-backed wooden rocking-chair, which had a flag bottom and a ruffled calico cushion, and could only rock a very few inches back and forth, owing to the loss of half of one of the rockers.  For the first part of the evening, Jane always knitted; but by eight o’clock the hands relaxed, the needles dropped, the tired head fell back against the chair, and she was fast asleep.

The boys were by themselves in the farther corner of the room, playing checkers or doing sums, or reading the village newspaper.  Reuben and Draxy were as alone as if the house had been empty.  Sometimes he read to her in a whisper; sometimes he pointed slowly along the lines in silence, and the wise little eyes from above followed intently.  All questions and explanations were saved till the next morning, when Draxy, still curled up like a kitten, would sit mounted on the top of the buckwheat barrel in the store, while her father lay stretched on the counter, smoking.  They never talked to each other, except when no one could hear; that is, they never spoke in words; there was mysterious and incessant communication between them whenever they were together, as there is between all true lovers.

At nine o’clock Reuben always shut the book, and said, “Kiss me, little daughter.”  Draxy kissed him, and said, “Good-night, father dear,” and that was all.  The other children called him “pa,” as was the universal custom in the village.  But Draxy even in her babyhood had never once used the word.  Until she was seven or eight years old she called him “Farver;” after that, always “father dear.”  Then Reuben would wake Jane up, sighing usually, “Poor mother, how tired she is!” Sometimes Jane said when she kissed Draxy, at the door of her little room, “Why don’t you kiss your pa for good-night?”

“I kissed father before you waked up, ma,” was always Draxy’s quiet answer.