302 ■ BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



done annually, not without much opposition and many hard 

 words, but still done. 



Then came a heavy blow. Lurana, a girl of fifteen, fresh and 

 pretty as a wild rose, and tired of the pinching economy, the 

 monotonous work and grinding life of the farm, ran away with a 

 tin peddler, and broke her mother's heart; not in the physical sense 

 that hearts are sometimes broken, but the weary woman's soul was 

 set on this bright, winsome child, and her life lost all its scant 

 savor when the blooming face and clear young voice left her 

 forever. 



"I don't blame her none, Amasy," she sobbed out to her boy, 

 now a stout fellow of twenty-two, raging at his sister's folly. 



" I can't feel to blame her. I know 'tis more'n a girl can bear 

 to live this way. I've had to, but it's been dreadful hard — dread- 

 ful hard! I've wished more'n once I could ha' laid down along 

 with the little babies out there on the hill, so's to rest a spell; but 

 there was you and Lury wanted me, and so my time hadn't come. 



" Amasy, you're a man grown now, and if you should, get mar- 

 ried, and I s'pose you will — men folks seem to think it's need- 

 ful, whether or no — do kinder make it easy for her, poor cretur! 

 Don't grind her down to skin and bone like me, dear; 'tant just 

 right, I'm sure on't, never to make no more of a woman than ef 

 she was a horned crittur; don't do it." 



"Mother, I never will! " answered the son, as energetically and 

 solemnly as if he were taking his oath. 



But Wealthy was nearer to her rest than she knev/; the enemy 

 that lurks in dirt, neglect, poor food, constant drudgery, and the 

 want of every wholesome and pleasurable excitement to mind and 

 body, and when least expected swoops down and does its fatal 

 errand in the isolated farm-house no less than in the crowded city 

 slums, the scourge of New England, typhoid fever, broke out in 

 the Tucker homestead. 



Wealthy turned away from her weekly baking one Saturday 

 morning just as the last pie was set on the broad pantry shelf, and 

 fainted on the kitchen floor, where Amasa the younger found her 

 an hour after, muttering, delirious, and cold. 



What he could do then, or the village doctor, or an old woman, 

 who called herself a nurse, was all useless; but the best skill of any 

 kind would have been equally futile ; she was never conscious again 

 for a week; then her eyes seemed to see what was about her once 



