ing and vacillating in its nature, that one of his neighbors was heard to say one day:—
"It don't seem 's if Sam Wilder could even die like other folks. He 's just a shilly-shallyin' along with that, 's he has with everything else he 's ever undertook,"
The day after the funeral poor Mrs. Wilder sent for her landlord, and told him the simple truth, that she had not a cent of money in the world, and no property except the little stock which they had put in the farm.
"Never you mind," said John Bassett's father; "you shall stay on this farm 's long 's you like. I 'll take the hay off the meadow land, and we 'll call that the rent. If you can manage to make a living for you and the girl somehow, you 're welcome to the house and the rest of the farm."
Ezekiel Bassett could well afford this, for the "Bassett farms," as they were called, were many and large, and comprised the greater portion of the best lands in Wenshire County. Nevertheless, it was a very generous thing for Ezekiel Bassett to do; and from that day the Wilders seemed to be a sort of outlying colony of the Bassett house. All the odds and ends of clothes and of food, which the Bassetts could spare and the Wilders could use, found their way to the little gray house down in the meadows; by the time John Bassett was ten years old, it seemed to him as natural to take blue berries to Mrs. Wilder as to his mother; he knew
