who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us,

that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth."

CHAPTER III.

T Mrs. Field had

were almost overcome by the unusualness of it.

Jane was a after their

neys. Elliot was a hundred and twenty miles away. She must go to Boston; then cross the city to the other depot, where she would take the Elliot train. This elderly unsophisticated woman might very reasonably have been terrified at the idea of taking this journey alone, but she was not. She never thought of it.

The latter half of the road to the Green River station lay through an unsettled district. There were acres of low birch woods and lusty meadow - lands. This morning they were covered with a goldgreen dazzle of leaves. To one looking across them, they almost seemed played over by little green flowers; now and then a young birch-tree stood away from the others, and shone by itself like a very torch of spring.

Mrs. Field walked steadily through it. She had never paused to take much thought of the beauty of nature; to-day a tree all alive and twinkling with leaves might, for all her notice, have been naked and stiff with frost.

She did not seem to walk fast, but her long steps carried her over the ground well. It was long before train-time when she came in sight of the little station with its projecting piazza roofs. She entered the ladies' room and bought her ticket, then she sat down and waited. There were two other women there-middleaged country women in awkward wool gowns and flat straw bonnets, with a certain repressed excitement in their homely faces. They were setting their large, faithful, cloth-gaitered feet a little outside their daily ruts, and going to visit some relatives in a neighboring town; they

grand multiple in the look on hers. She had not only stepped out of her rut, but she was going out of sight of it forever.

She sat there stiff and silent, her two feet braced against the floor, ready to lift her at the signal of the train, her black leather bag grasped firmly in her right hand.

The two women eyed her furtively. One nudged the other. "Know who that is?" she whispered. But neither of them knew. They were from the adjoining town, which this railroad served as well as Green River.

Sometimes Mrs. Field looked at them, but with no speculation; the next moment she looked in the same way upon the belongings of the little country depot-the battered yellow settees, the time-tables, the long stove in its tract of littered sawdust, the man's face in the window of the ticket office.

"Dreadful cross-lookin', ain't she?" one of the women whispered in the oth

er's ear.

Jane heard the whisper, and looked at them. The women gave each other violent pokes, they reddened and tittered nervously, then they tried to look out of the window with an innocent and absent air. But they need not have been troubled. Jane, although she heard the whisper perfectly, did not connect it with herself at all. She never thought much about her own appearance; this morning she had as little vanity as though she were dead.

When the whistle of the train sounded, the women all pushed anxiously out on the platform.

"Is this the train that goes to Boston?" Mrs. Field asked one of the other two. "I s'pose so," she replied, with a reciprocative flutter. "I'm goin' to ask so's to be sure. I'm goin' to Dale.'

dark flash of jet or a flutter of lace on a woman's dress, caught her eye, but she did not see it. She had nothing in common with anything of that kind; she had to do with the primal facts of life. Com

When the train stopped, Mrs. Field inquired of a brakeman. She was hardly satisfied with his affirmative answer. "Are you the conductor?" said she, sternly peering.

The young fellow gave a hurried wave of his hand toward the conductor, "There he is, ma'am."

Mrs. Field asked him also, then she hoisted herself into the car. When she had taken her seat, she put the same question to a woman in front of her.

It was a five hours' ride to Boston. Mrs. Field sat all the while in her place with her bag in her lap, and never stirred. There was a look of rigid preparation about her, as if all her muscles were strained for an instant leap.

Two young girls in the opposite seat noticed her and tittered. They had considerable merriment over her, twisting their pretty silly faces, and rolling their blue eyes in her direction, and then averting them with soft repressed chuckles.

Occasionally Mrs. Field looked over at them, thought of her Lois, and noted their merriment gravely. She never dreamed that they were laughing at her. If she had, she would not have considered it twice.

It was four o'clock when Mrs. Field arrived in Boston. She had been in the city but once before, when she was a young girl. Still, she set out with no hesitation to walk across the city to the depot where she must take the cars for Elliot. She could not afford a carriage, and she would not trust herself in a street car. She knew her own head and her old muscles; she could allow for their limitations, and preferred to rely upon them.

Every few steps she stopped and asked a question as to her route, listening sharply to the reply. Then she went straight enough, speeding between the informers like guide-posts. This old provincial threaded the city streets as unappreciatively as she had that morning the country one. Once in a while the magnificence of some shop window, a

she was quite unmoved by the thundering rush of the city streets. She might have been deaf and blind for all the impression it made upon her. Her own nature had grown so intense that it apparently had emanations, and surrounded her with an atmosphere of her own impenetrable to the world.

It was nearly five o'clock when she reached her station, and the train was ready. It was half past five when she arrived in Elliot. She got off the train, and stalked, as if with a definite object, around the depot platform. She did not for one second hesitate or falter. She went up to a man who was loading some trunks on a wagon, and asked him to direct her to Lawyer Tuxbury's office. Her voice was so abrupt and harsh that the man started.

"Cross the track, an' go up the street till you come to it, on the right-hand side," he answered. Then he stared curiously after her as she went on.

Lawyer Tuxbury's small neat sign was fastened upon the door of the L of a large white house. There was a green yard, and some newly started flower beds. In one there was a clump of yellow daffodils. Two yellow-haired little girls were playing out in the yard. They both stood still, staring with large wary blue eyes at Mrs. Field as she came up the path. She never glanced toward them.

She stood like a black-draped statue before the office door, and knocked. Nobody answered.

She knocked again louder. Then a voice responded, "Come in." Mrs. Field turned the knob carefully, and opened the door. It led directly into the room. There was a dull oil-cloth carpet, some beetling cases of heavy books, a few old arm-chairs, and one battered leather easychair.. A great desk stood against the farther wall, and a man was seated at it, with his back toward the door. He had white hair, to which the sunlight coming through the west window gave a redgold tinge.

Mrs. Field stood still, just inside the door. Apart from anything else, the

room itself had a certain awe-inspiring quality for her. She had never before been in a lawyer's office. She was fully possessed with the rural and feminine ignorance and holy fear of all legal appurtenances. From all her traditions, this office door should have displayed a grinning man or woman trap, which she must warily shun.

She eyed the dusty oil-cloth-the files of black books-the chairs-the man at the desk, with his gilded white head. He wrote on steadily, and never stirred for a minute. Then he again sung out, sharp

ly, "Come in.”

He was deaf, and had, along with his insensibility to sounds, that occasional abnormal perception of them which the deaf seem sometimes to possess. He often heard sounds when none were recognizable to other people.

Now, evidently having perceived no result from his first response, he had heard this second knock, which did not exist except in his own supposition and the waiting woman's intent. She had, indeed, just at this point said to herself that she would slip out and knock again if he did not look around. She had not the courage to speak. It was almost as if the deaf lawyer, piecing out his defective ears with a subtler perception, had actually become aware of her intention, which had thundered upon him like the knock itself.

Mrs. Field made an inarticulate response, and took a grating step forward. The old man turned suddenly and saw her. She stood back again; there was a shrinking stiffness about her attitude, but she looked him full in the face.

"Why, good day!" he exclaimed. "Good-day, madam. I didn't hear you come in."

Mrs. Field murmured a good day in

return.

"Take a seat, madam." The lawyer had risen, and was advancing toward her. He was a small, sharp-eyed man, whose youthful agility had crystallized into a nervous pomposity. Suddenly he stopped short, he had passed a broad slant of dusty sunlight which had lain between him and his visitor, and he could see her face plainly. His own elongated for a second, his under jaw lopped, and his brows contracted. Then he stepped for ward. Why, Mrs. Maxwell!" said he; "how do you do?"

"I'm pretty well, thank you," replied Mrs. Field. She tried to bow, but her back would not bend.

"I am delighted to see you," said the lawyer. "I recognize you perfectly now. I should have before, if the sun had not been in my eyes. I never forget a face."

He took her by the hand, and shook it up and down effusively. Then he pushed forward the leather easy-chair with gracious insinuation. Mrs. Field sat down, bolt-upright, on the extreme verge of it.

He

The lawyer drew a chair to her side, seated himself, leaned forward until his face fronted hers, and talked. His manner was florid, almost bombastic. had a fashion of working his face a good deal when he talked. He conversed quite rapidly and fluently, but was wont. to interlard his conversation with what seemed majestically reflective pauses, during which he leaned back in his chair and tapped the arm slowly. In fact his flow of ideas failed him for a moment, his mind being so constituted that they came in rapid and temporary bursts, geyser fashion. He inquired when Mrs. Field arrived, was kindly circumstantial as to her health, touched decorously but not too mournfully upon the late Thomas Maxwell's illness and decease. He alluded to the letter which he had written her, mentioning as a singular coincidence that at the moment of her entrance he was engaged in writing another to her, to inquire if the former had been received.

He spoke in terms of congratulation of the property to which she had fallen heir, and intimated that further discussion concerning it, as a matter of business, had better be postponed until morning. Daniel Tuxbury was very methodical in his care for himself, and was loath to attend to any business after six o'clock.

Mrs. Field sat like a bolt of iron while the lawyer talked to her. Unless a direct question demanded it, she never spoke herself. But he did not seem to notice it: he had enough garnered-in complacency to delight himself, as a bee with its own honey. He rarely realized it when another person did not talk.

After one of his pauses, he sprang up with alacrity. "Mrs. Maxwell, will you be so kind as to excuse me for a moment?” said he, and went out of the office