A New Graft on the Family Tree by Pansy

To the Morgan family the long golden summer months moved slowly. The first actual break in the household had come to them; none of the family had realized how hard it would be until it was met. I suppose it is a fact, many times proved by experience, that trial either softens or hardens the human heart. Certainly Mrs. Morgan's heart was not undergoing the softening process; she brooded over her first great anxiety until at times it seemed to her that no sorrow was like unto her sorrow, and she chafed under it as a cruel thing.

Farmer Morgan, though saying little, had aged under the trouble, and seemed at times like a broken-down man; yet he steadily resisted any effort at comfort, and sternly forbade any attempts to make search for the missing boy. "He has chosen to cut himself off from us," he would say coldly; "let him get the full benefit of it. " Yet there were times when he hinted, in the presence of the mother, that had the home atmosphere been less hard and cold John might have been kept; and she more than hinted, in the coldest of voices, that if his father had not treated John like a little boy, and made him work like a slave, there need have been no trouble: so of course these two could not help each other, and only grew further apart in their common sorrow. Taken altogether, the summer was one full of bitterness to the new bud that had been grafted on to the gnarled old tree.