you 've allus tried to do yore dooty the very best you could; not a-sayin' that you 'ain't tried."
"Most of us tries, Hester, even Dan'l."
"I ain't a-goin' to talk about Dan'l Hastings. He's jest naturally spiteful an' crabbed. I declare, I don't see how he's a-goin' to squeeze into the kingdom."
"Oh, never mind that, Hester. God ain't a-goin' to ask you to find a way."
Mrs. Hodges did not reply. She and her husband seldom disagreed now, because he seldom contradicted or found fault with her. But if this dictum of his went unchallenged, it was not so with some later conclusions at which he arrived on the basis of another of Fred's letters.
It was received several months after the settlement of the young man in Cincinnati, and succeeded a long silence, "You will think," it ran, "that I have forgotten you; but it is not so. My life has been very full here of late, it is true, but not so full as to exclude you and good Aunt Hester. I feel that I am growing. I can take good full breaths here. I could n't in Dexter: the air was too rarefied by religion."
Mrs. Hodges gasped as her husband read
