Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/246

 a real comfort to me to look at that whirl-hole, and this afternoon it come over me that after this there wouldn't be a single thing any more to remind us of anything, good or bad, we've ever done. It'll be most as if we hadn't lived at all. I just felt as though I couldn't go away from everything and everybody I've ever known, down to Hiram's stuffy little flat. And yet I suppose we are real lucky to have such a good son as Hiram, now the others are all gone. I dun'no' what we'd do if 'tweren't for him."

"Do!" cried his wife bitterly. "We could go on living right in this valley where we belong, if 'twas only in the poor-house!"

The old man answered reasonably, as though trying to convince himself, "Well, I suppose it's really flying in the face of Providence to feel so. The doctor says your lungs ain't strong enough to stand another of our winters in the mountains, fussing over stove fires, and zero weather and all, and I'm so ailing I probably wouldn't last through, either. He says it's a special dispensation that we've got such a nice place to go where there's steam heat, and warm as summer, day and night."

"Nathaniel!" exclaimed his wife, attempting to turn her bulky body toward him in the energy of her protest, "how can you talk so! We've visited Hiram and we know what an awful place he lives in. I keep a-seeing that little narrow room that's to be all the place you and I'll have, with the one window that gets flapped by the wash of the Lord knows who, and that kitchen as big as the closet to my bedroom here, and that long narrow hall—why, it's as much as ever I can walk down that