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The Mettle of the Pasture

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clear in afternoon sunshine. Each had the same thought of how empty it waited there without Dent--henceforth less than a son, yet how much more; more than brother, but how much less. How a brief ceremony can bind separated lives and tear bound ones apart! "Rowan," she said, as they walked slowly from the carriage to the porch, she having clasped his arm more intimately, "there is something I have wanted to do and have been trying to do for a long time. It must not be put off any longer. We must go over the house this afternoon. There are a great many things that I wish to show you and speak to you about--things that have to be divided between you and Dent." "Not to-day! not to-day!" he cried, turning to her with quick appeal. But she shook her head slowly, with brave cheerfulness. "Yes; to-day. Now; and then we shall be over with it. Wait for me here." She passed down the long hall to her bedroom, and as she disappeared he rushed into the parlors and threw himself on a couch with his hands before his face; then he sprang up and came out into the hall again and waited with a quiet face. When she returned, smiling, she brought with her a large bunch of keys, and she took his arm dependently as they went up the wide staircase. She led him to the upper bedrooms first--in earlier years so crowded and gay with guests, but unused during later ones. The shutters were closed, and the afternoon sun shot yellow shafts against floors and walls. There was a perfume of lavender, of rose leaves. "Somewhere in one of these closets there is a roll of linen." She opened one after another, looking into each. "No; it is not here. Then it must be in there. Yes; here it is. This linen was spun and woven from flax grown on your great-great-grandfather's land. Look at it! It is beautifully made. Each generation of the family has inherited part and left the rest for generations yet to come. Half of it is yours, half is Dent's. When it has been divided until there is no longer enough to divide, that will be the last of the home-made linen of the old time. It was a good time, Rowan; it produced masterful men and masterful women, not mannish women. Perhaps the golden age of our nation will some day prove to have been the period of the home-spun Americans." As they passed on she spoke to him with an increasing, almost unnatural gayety. He had a new appreciation of what her charm must have been when she was a girl. The rooms were full of memories to her; many of the articles that she caressed with her fingers, and lingered over with reluctant eyes, connected themselves with days and nights of revelry and the joy of living; also with prides and deeds which ennobled her recollection. "You and Dent know that your father divided equally all that he had. But everything in the house is mine, and I have made no will and shall not make any. What is mine belongs to you two alike. Still, I have made a list of things that I think he would rather have, and a list of things for you--merely because I wish to give something to each of you directly." In a room on a lower floor she unlocked a closet, the walls of which were lined with shelves. She peeped in; then she withdrew her head and started to lock the door again; but she changed her mind and laughed. "Do you know what these things are?" She touched a large box, and he carried it over to the bed and she lifted the top off, exposing the contents. "Did you ever see anything so _black_? This was the clerical robe in which one of your ancestors used to read his sermons. He is the one who wrote the treatise on 'God Properly and Unproperly Understood.' He was the great seminarian in your father's family--the portrait in the hall, you know. I shall not decide whether you or Dent must inherit this; decide for yourselves; I imagine you will end it in the quarrel. How black it is, and what black sermons flew out of it--ravens, instead of white doves, of the Holy Spirit. He was the friend of Jonathan Edwards." She made a wry face as he put the box back into the closet; and she laughed again as she locked it in. "Here are some things from my side of the family." And she drew open a long drawer and spoke with proud reticence. They stood looking down at part of the uniform of an officer of the Revolution. She lifted one corner of it and disclosed a sword beneath. She lifted another corner of the coat and exposed a roll of parchment. "I suppose I should have had this parchment framed and hung up downstairs, so that it would be the first thing seen by any one entering the front door; and this sword should have been suspended over the fireplace, or have been exposed under a glass case in the parlors; and the uniform should have been fitted on a tailor's manikin; and we should have lectured to our guests on our worship of our ancestors--in the new American way, in the Chino-American way. But I'm afraid we go to the other extreme, Rowan; perhaps we are proud of the fact that we are not boastful. Instead of concerning ourselves with those who shed glory on us, we have concerned ourselves with the question whether we are shedding glory on them. Still, I wonder whether our ancestors may not possibly be offended that we say so little about them!" She led him up and down halls and from floor to floor. "Of course you know this room--the nursery. Here is where you began to be a bad boy; and you began before you can remember. Did you never see these things before? They were your first soldiers--I have left them to Dent. And here are some of Dent's things that I have left to you. For one thing, his castanets. His father and I never knew why he cried for castanets. He said that Dent by all the laws of spiritual inheritance from his side should be wanting the timbrel and harp--Biblical influence, you understand; but that my influence interfered and turned timbrel and harp into castanets. Do you remember the day when you ran away with Dent and took him to a prize fight? After that you wanted boxing-gloves, and Dent was crazy for a sponge. You fought him, and he sponged you. Here is the sponge; I do not know where the gloves are. And here are some things that belong to both of you; they are mine; they go with me." She laid her hand on a little box

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