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Rh "May I not unburden my soul? I will do to the last what I will with my own!" Then, after a painful pause, more softly, "Let me leave it to your daughter. It is not much, but you'll think less harshly of me when, in your industrious. fashion, you turn up that black soil, Dowling." The sick man tried to smile. "You have slogged away like a brick. I admire your pluck! Give me your hand again. It is harder than once it was. You commend the gentleman to the world. I—and such as I—defame that 'grand old name.' 'All else of which I die possessed I leave to my nephew'—you know the name—'in the hope that he will make a worthy use of the lands I greedily held for myself.' Tell him," he added, "I repent my treatment of him. To come so far," he wandered on, almost to himself, "and then to be driven away. He was proud and wrong-headed. Ah, but my sister's son, with a big heart of his own, that angered because it condemned me."

With difficulty the Will was signed and witnessed. Two men who had come for "killing sheep" were dragged into the room in the early morning to write their names and vanish.

"I wish the sun would rise," Leicester faintly whispered. "Push aside the curtains; right back, please. Often I've lain here and waited for old Sol to appear over the ridge just behind that pine, this time of year. Even now I can see the links of gold, the wattles beside the creek. Jupiter is the morning star just now; there he shines, 'like a diamond in the sky.' Poor old mother. Venus is the evening star, I shall never see it more. Not here at least. Ah, there it is. God's blessed sun!"

And, as they helped him, with a last effort the dying man raised himself, stretched forth his arm towards the distant hills, and cried—