0f late Biah's good offices had been in special requisition, as thedeacon had been for nearly a week on a sick bed with one of thoseinterminable attacks of typhus fever which used to prevail in old times,when the physician did everything he could to make it certain that a manonce brought down with sickness never should rise again.

But Silas Pitkin had a constitution derived through an indefinitedistance from a temperate, hard-working, godly ancestry, and so withstoodboth death and the physician, and was alive and in a convalescent state,which gave hope of his being able to carve the turkey at his Thanksgivingdinner.

The night sunlight was just fading out of the little "keeping-room,"adjoining the bed-room, where the convalescent now was able to sit upmost of the day. A cot bed had been placed there, designed for him to liedown upon in intervals of fatigue. At present, however, he was sitting inhis arm-chair, complacently watching the blaze of the hickory fire, orfollowing placidly the motions of his wife's knitting-needles.