This was tangible help.  Reuben’s face lighted up.

“I thank you with all my heart,” he replied.  “That’ll be a great help to me; and I reckon you’ll like our vegetables, too,” he said, half smiling, for he knew very well that nothing but potatoes and turnips had been seen on Deacon White’s table for years.

Then Reuben went to find Draxy; when he told her, the color came into her face, and she shut both her hands with a quick, nervous motion, which was habitual to her under excitement.

“Oh, father, we can almost live off the garden,” said she.  “I told you we should not starve.”

But still new sorrows, and still greater changes, were in store for the poor, disheartened family.  In June a malignant fever broke out in the village, and in one short month Reuben and Jane had laid their two youngest boys in the grave-yard.  There was a dogged look, which was not all sorrow, on Reuben’s face as he watched the sexton fill up the last grave.  Sam and Jamie, at any rate, would not know any more of the discouragement and hardship of life.

Jane, too, mourned her boys not as mothers mourn whose sons have a birthright of gladness.  Jane was very tired of the world.

Draxy was saddened by the strange, solemn presence of death.  But her brothers had not been her companions.  She began suddenly to feel a sense of new and greater relationship to them, now that she thought of them as angels; she was half terrified and bewildered at the feeling that now, for the first time, they were near to her.

On the evening after Sam’s funeral, as Reuben was sitting on the store steps, with his head buried in his hands, a neighbor drove up and threw him a letter.

“It’s been lyin’ in the office a week or more, Merrill said, and he reckoned I’d better bring it up to you,” he called out, as he drove on.

“It might lie there forever, for all my goin’ after it,” thought Reuben to himself, as he picked it up from the dust; “it’s no good news, I’ll be bound.”

But it was good news.  The letter was from Jane’s oldest sister, who had married only a few years before, and gone to live in a sea-port town on the New England coast.  Her husband was an old captain, who had retired from his seafaring life with just money enough to live on, in a very humble way, in an old house which had belonged to his grandfather.  He had lost two wives; his children were all married or dead, and in his loneliness and old age he had taken for his third wife the gentle, quiet elder sister who had brought up Jane Miller.  She was a gray-haired, wrinkled spinster woman when she went into Captain Melville’s house; but their life was by no means without romance.  Husband and home cannot come to any womanly heart too late for sentiment and happiness to put forth pale flowers.

Emma Melville wrote offering the Millers a home; their last misfortune had but just come to her knowledge, for Jane had been for months too much out of heart to write to her relatives.  Emma wrote:—­