and enfolded George without seeing him. This occurred just at the moment when his father's groan of agony assured the boy he was not half an orphan.
Thereafter for a time detached sights and sounds registered themselves vividly but confusedly on the boy's consciousness. There were the feet of the solemn-faced bearers treading lightly and yet their foot-falls booming in his sensitive ears like thunder as they walked across the sitting-room floor and eased their heavy burden down on the bed. There was the crowd about the door. There were his father's groans; there was the wringing of his mother's hands, and the moaning and lamenting of the neighbor women, and the low-voiced, awed tones of the workingmen. There was rushing to get hot cloths for compresses, there was the smell of liniment and arnica; there was the doctor's buggy coming to the door, and by and by another doctor and another buggy. There were George and Jim running wildly past Kelley's to the nearest drug store and back on succeeding frantic errands; and there was his father, calmer now, but with face white and set, a kind of grim courage on it that George always knew was in his father.
"Dad!" he half-sobbed, and, creeping close, crouched to kiss the rough hand that hung over the edge of the bed—it was the trowel hand, the
