want him--I've done with him! I was done with him long afore--afore"--a
cough checked her utterance,--"afore"--She gasped again, but the words
seemed to strangle in her throat. Intent only on her words and scarcely
heeding her sufferings, Peter was bending over her eagerly, when the
doctor rudely pulled him away and lifted her to a sitting posture. But
she never spoke again. The strongest restoratives quickly administered
only left her in a state of scarcely breathing unconsciousness.
"Is she dying? Can't you bring her to," said the anxious Peter, "if only
for a moment, doctor?"
"I'm thinkin'," said the visiting doctor, an old Scotch army surgeon,
looking at the rich Mr. Atherly with cool, professional contempt, "that
your mother willna do any more washing for me as in the old time, nor
give up her life again to support her bairns. And it isna my eentention
to bring her back to pain for the purposes of geeneral conversation!"
Nor, indeed, did she ever come back to any purpose, but passed away with
her unfinished sentence. And her limbs were scarcely decently composed
by the attendants before Peter was rummaging the trunk in her room for
the paper she had spoken of. It was in an old work-box--a now faded
yellow clipping from a newspaper, lying amidst spoils of cotton thread,
buttons, and beeswax, which he even then remembered to have seen upon
his mother's lap when she superadded the sewing on of buttons to her
washing of the miners' shirts. And his dark and hollow cheek glowed with
gratified sentiment as he read the clipping.
"We hear with regret of the death of Philip Atherly, Esq., of Rough and
Ready, California. Mr. Atherly will be remembered by some of our readers
as the hero of the romantic elopement of Miss Sallie Magregor, daughter
of Colonel 'Bob' Magregor, which created such a stir in well-to-do
circles some thirty years ago. It was known vaguely that the young
couple had 'gone West,'--a then unknown region,--but it seems that
after severe trials and tribulations on the frontier with savages, they
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