Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/159

Rh at their feet, sleeping better so this August day than in his mother's arms. An insect buzzed too near the tiny rounded cheek, and Timothy leaned forward to brush it away. Speech came blithely under the stimulus of such proximity. "If I haven't had my pay before, I'll be more'n apt to get it with interest when he gets big enough to go to school," he cried.

The young mother caught her breath, and bending down, held one of the baby's hands against her face.

"He will be big enough by and by, Addie Lee," Timothy said, in gentlest palliation; "and when he is, I know we ought to be glad an' thankful he'll have what we've been seein' them other little children a-havin' this morning."

Pride of motherhood leaped lightly past its own misgiving. "Bless his heart, I know he'll learn as fast as any of 'em," she said.

"It's right for every generation to have a better chance than the one that went before it." The thought had been growing on Timothy all the spring, and he uttered it now with the satisfaction one feels in newly discovered truth. "There's the old meeting-house, now—"

Melissa Dean interrupted eagerly, seeing his meaning. "You know, Timothy, I've thought of it so many times! Just what we see before us—it is a picture of the past with all its pathos, and of the new with all its hope!" She never tried to put what she felt any differently because she had become lettered beyond him. Comprehension is not essentially a thing of the trained intellect.

The three were silent. Melissa's eyes travelled along the few irregular and nar-