II
MRS. BLOSSOM'S VALENTINE
It was a bitter night. Mrs. Blossom refilled the kitchen stove, and threw on more hickory in the fireplace in anticipation of her husband's late return from the village. She drew her little work-table nearer to the blaze, and sat down to her sewing. Then she sighed, and, as she bent over the large willow basket filled with stockings to be darned and clothes to be mended, a tear rolled down her cheek and plashed on the edge.
There was so much she wanted to do for her children—and so little with which to do it! There was March, an artist to his finger-tips, who longed to be an architect; and Rose, lovely in her young girlhood and giving promise of a lovelier womanhood, who was willing to work her way through one of the lesser colleges, if only she could be prepared for entrance. Mary Blossom saw no prospect of being able to do anything for either of them.
And the father! He must be spared first, if he were to be their future bread-winner. Mary Blossom could never forget that day, a year ago this very month, when her husband was brought home on a stretcher, hurt, as they thought, unto death, by a tree falling the wrong way in the woods where he was directing the choppers.
