Just as Elder Williams was concluding the communion service, the door of the church was burst open, and old Ike, tottering into the aisle, cried out in a shrill voice:—­

“Mis’ Kinney’s dead!  Mis’ Kinney’s dead!”

The scene that followed could not be told.  With flying feet the whole congregation sped up the steep hill—­Angy Plummer half lifting, half dragging Reuby, and the poor grandparents supported on each side by strong men.  As they drew near the house, they saw Draxy apparently sitting by the open window.

“O mamma! why that’s mamma,” shrieked Reuby, “she was sitting just so when we came away.  She isn’t dead.”

Elder Williams reached the house first, Hannah met him on the threshold, tearless.

“She dead, sir.  She’s cold as ice.  She must ha’ been dead a long time.”

Old Ike had been rambling around the house, and observing from the outside that Draxy’s position was strange, had compelled Hannah to go into the room.

“She was a smilin’ just’s you see her now,” said Hannah, “‘n’ I couldn’t ha’ touched her to move her more’n I could ha’ touched an angel.”

There are griefs, as well as joys, to which words offer insult.  Draxy was dead!

Three days later they laid her by the side of her husband, and the gray-haired, childless old people, and the golden-haired, fatherless and motherless boy, returned together broken-hearted to the sunny parsonage.

On the village a terrible silence, that could be felt, settled down; a silence in which sorrowing men and women crept about, weeping as those who cannot be comforted.

Then week followed after week, and soon all things seemed as they had seemed before.  But Draxy never died to her people.  Her hymns are still sung in the little lonely church; her gospel still lives in the very air of those quiet hills, and the people smile through their tears as they teach her name to little children.

Whose Wife Was She?

I was on my knees before my chrysanthemum-bed, looking at each little round tight disk of a bud, and trying to believe that it would be a snowy flower in two weeks.  In two weeks my cousin Annie Ware was to be married:  if my white chrysanthemums would only understand and make haste!  I was childish enough to tell them so; but the childishness came of love,—­of my exceeding, my unutterable love for Annie Ware; if flowers have souls, the chrysanthemums understood me.

A sharp, quick roll of wheels startled me.  I lifted my head.  The wheels stopped at our gate; a hurried step came down the broad garden-path, and almost before I had had time to spring to my feet, Dr. Fearing had taken both my hands in his, had said,—­“Annie Ware has the fever,”—­had turned, had gone, had shut the garden gate, and the same sharp quick roll of wheels told that he was far on his way to the next sufferer.

I do not know how long I stood still in the garden.  A miserable sullenness seemed to benumb my faculties.  I repeated,—­