1884.] THE TWO MRS. TUCKERS. 303 



more; she looked up at her boy, laid her wan cheek on her hand, 

 smiled — and died. 



Hardly had her wasted shape been put away under the mulleins 

 and hard hack, when her husband came in from the hayfield smit- 

 ten with the same plague. He was harder to conquer. Three 

 weeks of alternate burning, sinking, raving, and chills, ended at 

 last in the grey and grim repose of death for him, and another 

 Amasa Tucker reigned alone in the old house on the hill. 



It is not to be supposed that in all these years Amasa the younger 

 had been blind to the charms of the other sex; he had not " been 

 with " every girl who went to school with him, or whom he met 

 at singing schools or spelling matches, or who smiled at him from 

 her Sunday bonnet as he manfully '' held up his end " in the vil- 

 lage choir. 



He had been faithful always to the shy, delicate, dark-eyed little 

 girl who was his school sweetheart, and now it was to Mary Peet 

 he hastened to ask her to share his life and home. He had in- 

 tended to take a farm on shares the next summer, and work his 

 way slowly upward to a place of his own; now he had this hun- 

 dred acre farm, and to his great surprise he found $3,000 laid up 

 in the bank at Peet's Mills, the slow savings of his father's fifty 

 years. He began at once to set his house in ordet; he longed to 

 build a new one, but Mary's advice restrained him, so he did his 

 best with this. The cellar he cleared and whitewashed with his 

 own hands; cleaned its one begrimed window and set two more, 

 so that it was sweet and light; the house was scrubbed from one 

 end to the other; a bonfire made of the old dirty comfortables and 

 quilts ; the kitchen repainted a soft yellow, and new windows, with 

 clear, large glass, set in place of the dingy old sashes; the wood- 

 house was filled with dry wood and a good store of pine cones and 

 chopped brush for kindling. A new milk room was built, but a 

 little way from the back door, over a tiny brook that ran down the 

 hill north of the house, and under the slatted floor kept up a cool 

 draught of fresh air; a covered passage connected it with the 

 kitchen, and a door into the old milk room made of that a conven- 

 ient pantry, while the removal of the old one from the kitchen 

 corner gave to that apartment more room, air, and light. A new 

 stove, with a set boiler, filled up the hearth of the old fireplace; 

 but further improvements Amasa left for Mary. 



A different home-coming from his mother's she had indeed, on 



