Shaker John

I.

THE sun lay warm on the hills that June afternoon, tingeing with brighter scarlet the strawberries that were ripening in the growing grass. The roses were in all their glory, and the little brown cottage under the maple - tree was nearly covered with their bloom. Into the open window floated their fragrance till the air was heavy with it.

But she who had longed so much for the summer was rapidly passing from all earthly summers forever.

The monotonous hum of the bees among the roses soothed to quiet slumber the little watcher by her bedside, while she gazed on the unconscious boy with looks of unutterable love. Who may tell the agony of that mother’s heart as she felt herself gliding away from that little helpless one who had never known any care or love save hers ? Who, in the whole wide world, could fill her place to the shrinking, sensitive child ?

All the sad past came up before her, as she lay there that summer afternoon, — memories of girlhood, of a happy bride, a proud mother, and, so soon ! a widow. Then she recalled the struggle that followed, when she toiled bravely for the sake of her boy, year after year with ever-failing strength, till at last, when Johnnie was ten years old, she lay down to die. There was no hope for her, and she knew it ; but when she told Johnnie so, he did not and could not and would not believe it.

The day drifted on to evening, and the stars came out and shone into the quiet room before Johnnie awoke.

“ Please, darling, get me a cup of water and then eat your supper, for I want to talk with you.”

He brought the water and sat down again by her side, awed by the strange pallor of her face into a fearful, sickening dread.

“Johnnie darling, mother is going away from you now for a little while, — going home to heaven. My precious darling, will you always, as long as you live, remember all I have told you and try to be as good as if I were with you ? I think God will sometimes let me be with you, though you cannot see me.”

With a bitter cry, as if hope had gone out in his heart, he answered, “ O mother, mother, do not leave me ! Take me with you, — do, mother, take me with you ! I cannot live without you, you know I cannot. Ask God to let me die too.”

Tears, the last the poor mother was to shed, rolled down her cheeks as she clasped the boy close to her heart, already beating with the labored throbs of death. “O Johnnie, my own darling, God will take care of you, indeed he will! He says, ‘When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will takg me up.’ You must love him and trust him, and he will surely take care of you. Now, Johnnie, kiss me and then go to sleep right here in my arms.”

And Johnnie kissed her over and over and over again, with a tempest of sobs and tears, till at last, worn out with his grief, he sank down by her side and was again in a troubled sleep. The mother clasped him closer and closer, and gazed at him as long as her dim, dying eyes could see; and then she too slept.

A neighbor, coming in soon after, found them lying in each other’s arms ; but Johnnie was motherless.

II.

OUT a few miles from a flourishing city was the Shaker community of Bethlehem. The broad acres of fertile meadow and hill-slope gave evidence of careful cultivation. The great barns were filled almost to bursting with the abundant harvests. Fat, sleek cattle fed in the pastures and gave promise of a dairy full of milk, butter, and cheese. Sheep were scattered over the hillsides, and many acres were blue with the delicate blossom of the flax. Everything indicated industry, thrift, and neatness, as is always the case in the Shaker communities. Beyond these virtues they seldom went. Utilitarians of the strictest sort, they argued that the beautiful was only to be cultivated by the world’s people, and that to their everlasting undoing. So the Brothers went about their work with grave faces that hardened year by year into rigid lines, — faces in which one read the extinguishment of human hope and love and happiness. The Sisters, in their grotesque garb, lost year by year the sweetness and serenity that should have been theirs, and became angular and unlovely in mind and body. No sweet feminine graces were theirs, no dainty touches were allowed to soften the rudeness of their surroundings. You saw no flowers growing in their windows or in their gardens, no bouquets in their rooms. True, they had great beds of sage and thyme and summer-savory, and they excelled in preparing these herbs for the market. But they did not cultivate flowers for their own sweet sake. What call had they to love the world’s vanities and weeds?

A serious, sober, simple, quiet people, kindly, plain in manner ; — it was in their quaint Community that Johnnie Lawrence found himself the next day after his mother’s funeral. There had been neither kith nor kin to claim the orphan, and the neighbors, who had been very kind to Mrs. Lawrence during her illness, were too poor and had too many children of their own to add one more to their number. They talked together about Johnnie, and it had been decided by them that he could find no better home than among the Shakers at Bethlehem. So it came about that the very next day he was taken there.

When Johnnie found that his mother was dead, he made no outcry and shed no tear, but his face had a look far more sad to see than the most violent weeping. He seemed so benumbed by the shock as hardly to comprehend the sorrowful funeral rites ; but when the coffin was lowered into the grave he uttered a wailing cry of, “ Mother, mother ! ” and sank senseless to the ground. It was in this helpless state that they took him to the Shakers, and the good woman who carried him there wept over him when she left him, and assured the neighbors upon her return that Johnnie would soon follow his mother.

But young hearts are strong after all, and grief seldom kills; and so, though Johnnie lay in a low fever for several weeks, during which he was tenderly cared for by the good Sisters, yet at last he came slowly but surely back to life. For some time he was too weak to know or care where he was. After a while he asked a few questions, and Sister Martha, who had come to have the sole care of him latterly, told him as gently as she could what had taken place. He listened in silence, then turned his face to the wall. Sister Martha, kind soul, tried to comfort him, but he took no notice of her for hours. There he lay, his thin hands over his white face, while between his fingers slowly trickled the tears. Occasionally a sob shook his slight frame, and sometimes Sister Martha fancied she heard him whisper, " Mother.”

From that time he asked no questions, but accepted his lot without a word. To Sister Martha he particularly attached himself, as in some degree taking the place of his mother; though Sister Martha, coarse-featured, angular, large-handed, and uncouth, was very different from the beautiful, delicate, graceful mother whose memory Johnnie kept sacred in his heart. But there was something of the same mother love in her eyes, and that sanctified and beautified her in his sight.

For a few years the duties required of Johnnie were very light and pleasant. To drive the cows to and from their pasture, to carry water to the busy workers in the field, to gather herbs and berries and fruit, — these were all agreeable tasks. The pure air and plain plentiful food and healthful exercise gave new life and strength to the boy, and brought a bright glow to the cheeks that had been so pale, and rounded out the slight limbs to a healthful fulness. But he was always quiet and gentle, and wore a certain air of refinement in contrast with his surroundings. As he grew older his nature sometimes rebelled at the coarse, rude life of the Shakers, and he questioned with himself why all that makes life beautiful was so sedulously excluded by them. He gave no expression, however, to all that passed in his mind ; and as the years wore away and he steadily worked on at the trade, shoemaking, which he had learned, no one of that Brotherhood imagined that “Brother John” had any higher aspirations than the rest of them.

He seldom “ went out into the world,” as they termed mingling with the outsiders ; but on such rare occasions he always came back with a crushed, desponding spirit. The glimpses he caught of another life revealed to him something better and higher and nobler than that of the Community, and led him back in memory to the little vine-covered cottage, and the gentle mother who had made his young life under that lowly roof seem a dream of Paradise. To no one did he speak of all this; perhaps, had Sister Martha lived, he might have gone to her for sympathy, but Sister Martha had for years slept in her lowly, unmarked grave. “ Gone over there,” they always answered, with an indefinite wave of the hand, when questioned of one who was dead.

Gradually there grew up in Brother John’s mind a desire to leave the Community. At first he rejected the idea as impracticable, but it returned again and again, and grew upon him more and more. Meanwhile, till he could see the way clear for its accomplishment, he worked steadily at his trade, making the heavy shoes that seemed to him like everything else about him, coarse and ungainly.

III.

“WELL, Sue, what shall we do today ? We must improve every one of these shining hours.”

Sue, who was a beautiful young mother with her first baby asleep in her arms, got up and walked gently to the cradle, singing in a low voice all the while to the little one as she carefully laid it down. Then she stole out of the room.

“Now, Lucy.”

“I have it, Sue, let us go out to Bethlehem this morning and see the Shakers. You know we have been talking about it ever so long.”

“ But our babies, Lucy.”

“ O those babies! We can leave them well enough this morning. They will be taken good care of.”

So, with many injunctions to the nurse, they departed. They were schoolfriends who had seldom met since their marriage, and they were now renewing the pleasant friendship of old times.

It was a delightful drive,-first, through the crowded city streets ; then out where the houses began to straggle farther and farther apart, and the country to steal in between ; a little farther and the road lay through shady woods and between cultivated fields, and every vestige of the city was left behind. The friends were as happy that morning as in the merry days whose memories they recalled with so many peals of laughter, and they reached Bethlehem in a gay mood, prepared to enjoy everything they should see and hear.

The Sisters, as usual, were going about their work, looking to the kitchen, the dairy, the spinning and weaving, and whatever else came in their department ; but one of them cheerfully accompanied the ladies on their round of observation. The friends admired the order and neatness everywhere visible, — the milk-pans shining like silver, the pails and churns scoured to a snowy whiteness. They must taste the butter, and have a drink of the milk, and try some of the cheese, and the cheese made some bread necessary, and that reminded Sister Hannah that some honey would not be out of place with the bread ; and so they had a gay lunch with Sister Hannah, who found herself laughing merrily at their enjoyment of everything. It was quite an extraordinary thing for Sister Hannah to laugh, and it really made her plain face grow young and beautiful. Poor soul, doubtless she reproved herself long after for having been betrayed into such worldliness and levity ?

After the lunch they took a stroll over the gardens, and there Brother John met them. He bowed to them with instinctive but most un-Shakerlike grace, and they were at once struck by the contrast between him and the other Brothers they had met. He, on his part, followed their every motion with eyes that took in all the difference between them and the ungainly Sister Hannah. There was something in Lucy’s voice, her elastic step, her slender figure, that reminded him of his mother, that dear, dead mother who had been all these long years enshrined in his memory, the embodiment of perfect grace and goodness. He followed them at a respectful distance, contrasting in his mind the culture and refinement they manifested in every look and tone and motion with the coarseness of the Sisters’ manners. The very sweep of their drapery seemed to him marvellously beautiful by the side of poor Sister Hannah’s scant skirts that switched so ungracefully about her thick ankles, revealing her colored woollen stockings and great coarse shoes. Sister Hannah certainly suffered in all points by the contrast, from her hideous head-gear to the No. 7s on her feet. Brother John finally turned away in despair.

The sound of Lucy’s clear laugh drew him again in their direction, and he followed them with wistful eyes that revealed something of what was passing in his heart. The ladies, in a pause of their gay talk, noticed the eager look, and Lucy impulsively turned toward him and said, “ Brother John, are you contented here ? ”

He was not prepared for the question, and his heart cried out bitterly at its seeming cruelty. “ How can she,” he thought, “ with all her beauty and culture and love, taunt me with the poverty of my life?” Perhaps he did not think it in just these words, but such was the current of his thoughts. Yet, with all the calmness he could, he simply answered, “ I have lived here from childhood.”

Why did not that suffice ? Why must she demand still further, “ But are you happy here ? ”

The question pierced him through and through, for his heart, after all the discipline it had undergone, was still very human.

There was no revelation in his manner of what was passing in his mind, and he replied in the same low, measured, passionless tones, “ This has long been my home.”

“ Home,” echoed Lucy, looking around at the prim, stiff, bare houses of the Community, — “ home ! but you would be so much happier in a home of your own, I am sure.”

Brother John did not reply, but the words rung in his ears, and he almost wailed them over to himself, weeks afterwards, “ You would be so much happier in a home of your own.”

With an invitation to Brother John to call upon them when he visited the city, the ladies went. In a few days the memory of that visit was, to them, only one among many pleasant memories.

Not so with Brother John. The grave, silent man grew, if possible, still more grave and silent. “ Must I,” so he questioned with himself, — “must I try forever to satisfy myself with these dry husks which have no kernel of affection in them ? Must I starve my spirit here, when in the world there is fulness of beauty and love ? Why should I not go away from this place where I have been so cramped and dwarfed every way, and live among men, and measure myself with them, and try to grow like them ? Yes, why should not I, too, have a home all my own ? ”

So he reasoned, and gradually the desire to leave the Shakers, at first misty and indistinct, took form. Come what would, he could not stay there longer. The very air stifled him. He must go away where he could breathe more freely.

Then he remembered the invitation he had received to call upon the ladies who had helped him so much, unwittingly, to his decision; and he resolved to go and see them before he should make known to the Brotherhood his intention of leaving them.

To the city Brother John went. But in its crowded streets, jostled by its rushing, bustling throng of well-dressed men and women, he began to feel how different he was from them. If he had little in common with the Shakers, he had still less with this new world in which he found himself. He looked with a degree of bitterness at his own coarse dress and brown hands. He became suddenly and painfully aware of his own deficiences, and the man who, at the Farm, was so quiet and self-possessed, and contrasted so favorably with the other Brothers, grew awkward and uneasy, and walked with shambling step and downcast eye. Almost his courage failed him, and he had half resolved to go back and live and die in the Community, when he found himself in front of the house he was seeking.

A great desire to see again the woman who had reminded him so much of his mother took possession of him, and he rung the bell with almost childish eagerness. His ring was answered and he was shown into the parlor where the two ladies sat, surrounded by their children ; making — so Brother John thought — the sweetest homepicture he had ever looked upon.

They received him kindly, and asked him all sorts of questions about Bethlehem and its people. Could they have known what was passing in his mind, they would doubtless have said something in reference to his leaving the Shakers, but it never occurred to them that such an idea had entered his mind, still less that they had done anything to suggest it to him. So the time passed away, Brother John noticing everything in the room, and each moment seeming carried back nearer and nearer to his childhood and his mother. When he left the house, though not an allusion had been made to the subject, his mind was fully made up. He would come out into the world. Henceforth his end and aim in life should be to make for himself a home, — such a home as he had just visited. Then Brother John blushed, a vivid, painful blush, as he fancied some sweet-faced, pleasant woman who would make that home all the world to him. Instinctively, he gave that unknown woman the form and features of his mother.

It was with a firm step and uplifted face that he now walked. No more hesitation, no more doubt. He would henceforth be a man among men. He would go out and live among them, and hold up his head with the best of them. He felt in his heart that he had the power to do it, and his nerves were strung with the intensity of his resolve.

IV.

THE great barn-doors at Bethlehem swung wide open, revealing to the passer-by the abundance of the harvest stored within. The sweet smell of the hay came wafted by the breeze, more delicious than any gale that sweeps over Araby the blest. Motherly, clucking hens with great broods of half-grown chickens sought shelter inside the friendly open doors from the fierceness of the heat, and tried in vain to restrain their thoughtless offspring from too reckless pursuit of the temptingly fat grasshoppers that started up in every direction.

In the pastures the cows lay quietly chewing their cuds, with meditative eyes, under the shadow of the trees, waiting till they should be driven up for the evening milking.

The Brothers toiled patiently in the fields, with moist faces and sun-browned hands, — toiled patiently, but with a painful, mechanical air, as if they carried to their labor no more of heart or hope than the machines they were using in their work.

In the houses the Sisters were busy as usual, — they were always busy there, — but who could look at their patient, hopeless faces without pity ? Occasionally there was a fair, sweet, saintly one that told of heavenly hopes and communings so bright and real as to make earthly joys dim and worthless. There were others seamed and scarred all over with the inner conflict. There were eyes that looked as from behind prison bars ; other eyes, sad and full of unshed tears. There were some timid, gentle, loving faces, that should have been seen only in quiet, happy homes, not in Bethlehem. There were others coarse, stupid, hard.

Brother John noticed them all that evening as he had never noticed them in the twenty years of his life there. Now that he was about leaving them there sprung up in his heart a pitying, loving sympathy for them. There was a certain feeling of familiarity with them that had taken the place of tenderer ties, and now he felt as if, after all, he might be going away from home. For a moment he almost drew back, and he had a weak notion of going to the Brothers and telling them he would stay with them. Only for a moment, though, and then the desire for something better than life there could possibly offer grew strong within him. With beating, anxious heart he went to the room where he was to meet the elders and receive the sum of money which, after due deliberation, they should conclude his services worth for the twenty years he had been with them.

Were this story a fiction, I should never think of naming so small a sum as Brother John found set down to his credit. As it is a true story, I hardly dare mention it for fear of throwing discredit on a whole sect. True he had been received into the Community when he was a feeble, delicate child. They had cared for him through severe and protracted sickness. Little labor had been required of him for several years, while he had been fed and clothed and sheltered. They had taught him how to make the coarse “stoga” shoes worn at Bethlehem. He, on his part, had wrought faithfully for twelve of the twenty years at that trade. The Community was rich. Might not Brother John expect at least a few hundred dollars to begin life with ?

He found himself, that summer evening, standing half stupefied, looking back upon the Community which he had just quitted, and upon which the setting sun shone as if in benediction, with exactly two dollars and fifty cents in his pocket ! And “ the world was all before him where to choose. ”

With pardonable bitterness John Lawrence, now Brother John no longer, recalled the time, twenty years ago, when he was brought there senseless and helpless ; and the thought crossed his mind that he was beginning the world, at thirty years of age, in just as helpless a condition.

There had been a great commotion at Bethlehem when Brother John announced his intention of leaving. He was the last one they would have suspected of any such desire. He had always been so self-possessed and reticent, they thought him perfectly satisfied. There was even talk of making him an elder, and it was confidently predicted that he would some day be a great man among them.

The Sisters, too, all liked him,— he was always so ready to do any little kindness. They would sadly miss his pleasant face out of the little sunshine in their lives. There had been some effort made to retain him, but he was so decided that it was at once given up. And now he was gone.

As he stood looking back upon the spot that had been all the home he had known for so many years, he saw one of the Sisters stealing quietly towards him, with a little package in her hand; and when it proved to be Sister Hannah, who had followed him with a paper of bread and cheese, which she gave him, telling him he might want it for his breakfast, his heart smote him for the bitter thoughts he had been indulging. There was some good there after all ; and when poor Sister Hannah said good by with faltering voice and tearful eyes, and turned back home again, he forgot about her awkward figure, slouchy bonnet, coarse hands and feet, and remembered only the womanly kindness that for the time beautified her.

So John Lawrence, at thirty years of age, had his next day’s breakfast in his hand, and two dollars and fifty cents in his pocket, and the world before him.

It was no hardship for him to spend the first night within the shelter of a barn, about half-way from Bethlehem to the city. His poverty made it necessary ; but, aside from this, it gave a certain spice of romance, a flavor of adventure, that was in no wise distasteful to the man in his present mood. For he was but a young man, after all ; and now that he had fairly entered the world, he began to feel within himself the energy and ambition that his life with the Shakers had only crushed and repressed, not killed. So he laid himself down on the fragrant hay, and the moon shone brightly in at the open doors, and John Lawrence, with halfshut eyes, dreamed of the future upon which he was now entering. Gradually the barn in which he slept changed into a fair home, with beautiful rooms filled with rare adornments, and moving among them, the chief attraction, was a sweet-faced woman, who, in the vagaries of his dream, wore by turns the features of his mother, then of the two well-remembered visitors at Bethlehem, and sometimes of Sister Hannah. As his sleep deepened the picture grew more intense and real, and then the whole night long she who moved in his dream wore the calm, still face and loving eyes of his mother.

Was not that mother, in her intense yearning love, thus fulfilling her dying promise to be sometimes with him if God would permit ? Might he not have known, from that vision of the night, that the world held for him no dearer home, no nearer love, than he had known in that little brown cottage under the old maple-tree ?

Happily, — or was it not rather unhappily ? — all this was hidden from his eyes.

He woke in the morning refreshed by his sleep. Sister Hannah’s bread and cheese were by no means despised, with the eager appetite he found himself possessed of. The morning was cool and beautiful, and the young man felt a new accession of determination and energy with every step he took towards the city.

It had been long ago decided in his mind that his first act on entering the city should be to buy himself a new suit of clothes. “And they shall be fashionably made too,” he had said to himself dozens of times, this young man who had hitherto worn only the grotesque homespun Shaker garb. This was out of the question now. The hated Shaker raiment must cling to him awhile longer; a small matter, it was true, but were not his other plans for being in the world and like the world to be similarly unsuccessful ?

He resolved to apply for work at the various shoe-shops till he should obtain it. He therefore called at the very first one that came in his way, but was gruffly informed that they wanted no renegade Shakers there! “So much forthese miserable clothes!” he thought, as he went on to one and another and another, in all of which he was equally unsuccessful. None of them wanted a hand at his style of work, for there was little sale for stoga shoes in the city. So the day wearily wore on, and poor John Lawrence’s heart sank lower and lower at every refusal; and when night came and found him still without prospect of employment, he almost wished himself safely back at the Farm again.

He sought a cheap lodging-house, paid a few cents for a slice of bread and a cup of tea, and lay down in a little dingy room with a heavier heart than he had ever known before. No pleasant dreams for him that night, no sweet visions of mother or home. Instead, a troubled, restless sleep in the close, hot air of that not over-clean lodging-house, and a waking at early dawn to a sickening remembrance of the previous day’s experience.

The search for work was as fruitless as before, and he retired at night with a weary body and sad heart. Dayafter day the result of his efforts was the same, and a week passed before John Lawrence found employment. Even then it was to be poorly paid, for the company employing him had done it more out of sympathy for him than a need or desire for his work. This he felt, and he was stung to the quick by the knowledge; but he resolved as soon as practicable to learn some more desirable branch of the trade.

It was hardly to be expected that the men with whom he now associated in his daily life were men of refinement. They were unfeeling, almost brutal. Day after day they taunted John Lawrence with his Shaker dress, and be soon came to be known among them only as “ Shaker John.”When he had, by strictest economy, saved enough to buy himself a suit of clothes such as they wore, they greeted him with shouts of derisive laughter, called him “turncoat,” and he was “Shaker John ” still. There was no limit to their petty spite, and it manifested itself in every conceivable annoyance. All this, however, he could have borne cheerfully had there been any compensation in his life. Had any pleasant home-circle been opened to him, had any kind-hearted Christian extended to him a helping hand, had any pitying mother looked tenderly into his sad eyes and spoken cheering words such as mothers can speak, — then he would have felt himself full panoplied against the shafts of malice daily hurled at him in the shop. Alas !

and, as the months passed, he began to lose courage, and hope grew faint within him, while his face became pale and thin, and his eyes wore the look his mother’s wore long before.

I would like you to take a glance with me at the little room he called home during those dark days. It was away up, up, up, in a cheap boarding-house, right under the roof. It was guiltless of plaster, but John with his own hands had whitewashed the rough bricks and brown rafters to a snowy whiteness. His cot bed stood in one corner of the room, while a little table and one chair completed his store of furniture. Yet, he always contrived to find a few flowers for the tumbler on the table, and it was pathetic to see how he tried to give the room a homelike air by pinning up against the rough wall the engravings that had in various ways come into his possession. It might be seen at once that he had chosen them, simple though they were, with a tasteful eye, and hung them in the best light, — if light it could be called that struggled so hard past all the corners and angles of surrounding buildings into the narrow four-paned window. There were brackets also, of his own manufacture, that held bits of bright moss or curious stones gathered during his occasional Sunday rambles into the country. There was one fortunate thing about it, his room was always well supplied with books from the free libraries of the city.

A poor, pitiful home it was, and you or I would turn away from it at once ; but I think it was a great comfort to John Lawrence then, and that its possession and adornment intensified his desire for another and better and less solitary home. At any rate his tired, worn face always took on a look of rest and peace when he entered it and locked himself in, and he always cast a loving glance back at it when he left it for the day.

So a year went by, — to John Lawrence a long, lonely year. Meanwhile he had learned another and better paying branch of his trade, and with the beginning of his second year he found work at another establishment, and his prospects seemed brightening. But he carried far less heart and hope into his new business. His year’s experience of the world had materially lessened his confidence in his ability to cope successfully with it, and had increased his diffidence and reserve. To himself he seemed to have made no headway towards gaining the dearest object of his ambition, and he sometimes feared he never should. He had formed no acquaintances, as he never could bring himself to make the first advances, and those who casually met him never dreamed how the heart of that quiet man was consuming itself in the vain intensity of its longing for companionship and love. And still the months went on, bringing no change to John Lawrence, except an occasional walk in the fields. Latterly these walks all turned toward Bethlehem. Had any one loved him, had any one even cared for him with a friendly interest, that friend would have noticed how he grew thinner and paler ; but there was no one to notice or to care. Later in the fall he became feverish and restless, and his room, which had always been his dearest refuge, now became like a prison to him. Evening after evening, and sometimes far on into the night, he walked the streets of the city, never pausing except it were before an open window to look at the home-picture within. He heard music and merry voices, saw parents and children mingling together in happy forgetfulness of everything save their own enjoyment. How could they dream of the bitterness surging over the heart of the wanderer who looked at and envied their bliss ? Could but one such home — only one out of all the thousands in that great city— have opened its doors to him and bid him welcome, he would have been satisfied.

Winter set in early that year, — a bleak, cold winter, — and then an unexpected calamity befell him. A great commercial panic swept over the country, and thousands of workmen were thrown out of employment. John Lawrence was one of the number. When he went as usual one morning to his work, his employer told him there was nothing more for him to do, at the same time handing him the few dollars still due him. John was stupefied : this was an unthought-of misfortune, and he went back to his cold room and threw himself on his bed, feeling that he might as well give up the struggle, whose termination he now too plainly foresaw.

Not quite yet, though. He would make one more effort. The next day, accordingly, he went from shop to shop, but no one was hiring men then, while nearly every shop was discharging them. Then he tried to find something else to do ; anything, he did not care what, so it would promise him the barest support. Here again he was unsuccessful. Whole armies of laborers — men, too, with helpless families depending on them—were before him. He could not push himself among them, could not urge his claim to a place for which scores equally or more necessitous were clamoring.

Back again to his cold room. He could afford no fire now. He must even restrict himself to the coarsest and cheapest food, and never enough of that. His disease, aggravated by exposure and insufficient food, and by his utter friendlessness as much, gained rapidly upon him. As he grew worse, and the fever rioted in his veins, he did not want fire, — he was burning up already. He did not care for food any more. He only wanted water, icecold water, and there was no one in all that city to take a cup of cold water to the parched lips of the sufferer in that lonely garret.

At length the keeper of the boarding-house, moved by a fear that he should lose his rent or that John would die and he should be at some expense for the funeral, went into the white washed attic room and asked the sick man if he had no friend to whom he could go and be taken care of. John, whose only wish was to be left to die in peace, answered that he had none.

“ Then,” said the landlord, — “then you must go to the poor-house.”

The poor-house ! O John Lawrence ! is that the home your heart longed for, and your fancy painted so fondly, for which you prayed and labored ?

He looked round at the little room where, after all, he had enjoyed more home-feeling than anywhere else. He looked at the fading moss, the little pictures, the pitiful trifles he had so laboriously collected to ornament his room. “ Poor worthless trifles, all,” he thought. They were of no value now; he must drag himself away somewhere to die.

Where ?

His mind turned back to Bethlehem. " Poor fool, better had I never left it!” he said bitterly, as his mind recalled his unavailing efforts to make his way in the world.

But that was all over now, all over, and he would go back and die in Bethlehem. “ Sister Hannah will be glad to see me,” he said to himself with a sad smile.

Wearily he toiled down the long stairs, up which his tired feet would never toil again ; out into the winter sunshine which mocked him with its brightness. With slow and feeble step he turned towards Bethlehem, only one wish uppermost in his mind,—to live till he should reach there. On, on, he dragged himself, the cold air chilling his fevered blood till it almost stood still in his veins. All day on, slowly, painfully, and at night he stood where he could see the setting sun gild Bethlehem, just as he had seen it before, when he went away. For a moment he recalled that outgoing and contrasted it with the return,— only for a moment. He was too tired now to care much about it. He was getting very cold. He only wanted to see Sister Hannah and die.

An hour later a feeble step was heard on the threshold of one of the houses, and then a fall. The Brothers who heard it went to the door, and there lay John Lawrence. Not quite dead, though at first they thought him so, for he opened his eyes as they carried him in, and asked for Sister Hannah.

And Sister Hannah came, much wondering who could want her then. She knew him at once. He clasped her outstretched hand, whispered faintly, as a look of unutterable peace stole over his face, “ Home at last, mother,” — and Sister Hannah held the hand of the dead.

Mrs. E. B. Raffensperger.