"You've got the best of me. They all do," he said in dying, with a last turn of the sombre eyes toward his neighbor. "You ought to have gone first by a week, and there you are. But this time I guess it's just as well. I don't seem to want to fight any longer, and I'm glad I'm done. It's your turn next. Good--"
The words had come with gasps between and long pauses. Here they stopped once for all. Good had found him; the only good for the child of earth, who, having failed to learn his lesson here, must try a larger school with a different system of training. The empty bed was not filled at once. A screen shut it off. There was time now to hear other words than the passionate railings that had monopolized all time. The sick man mended a little, and in one of the days in which speech was easier gave this record of his forty years:--
"It's a fact, I believe, that the sons of reformers seldom walk in the same track. My father was one of the old Abolitionists, and an honest one, ready to give money when he could and any kind of work when he couldn't. It was a great cause. I cried over the negroes down South and went without sugar a year or so, and learned to knit so that I could knit some stockings for the small slaves my own size. But by the time I was eight years old it was plain enough to me that there were other kinds of slavery quite as bad, and that my own mother wore as heavy bonds as any of them. She was a farmer's wife, and from year's end to year's end she toiled and worked. She never had a cent of her own, for the butter money was consecrated to the cause, and she gave it gladly. My father had no particular intention to be unkind. He was simply like a good two-thirds of the farmers I have known,--much more careful of his animals than of his wife. A woman was so much cooking and cleaning and butter-making force, and child-bearing an incident demanding as little notice as possible. It is because of that theory that I am five inches shorter than any of our tribe. My mother was a tall, slender woman, with a springy step and eyes as clear as a brook. I see them sometimes as I lie here at night.
"I said to myself when I was ten that I'd have things easier for her before she died. I said it straight ahead while I was working my way up in the village store, for I would not farm, and when she died I said it to her in the last hour I ever heard her voice: 'What I couldn't do for you, mother, I'll do for all women as long as I am on the earth.'