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"Pshaw! pshaw!" said Dan.

"Pshaw! pshaw! pshaw! if you will," sputtered Mag, "I know it will. There's Jims already got out of the poor-house and become a smart one they say. And who knows what's before the whole of us?"

"Dan!" said the old widow, "is the Lord's hand shortened that it cannot save?"

"That's a plaguy sight more than I know," said he.

"But I know," says Mag. "He's Almighty!"

"Yes," said Mrs. Rice, "it's nothing for him to do wonders."

Had Mrs. Dodge died when she was Joanna Martin, in the height of her loveliness, at seventeen, all the young men and ladies of Crampton would have gone mourning to her grave. How many words of consolation would her parents and sisters have received! What prayers would have been offered, what sermons preached! Had she died at forty, in the zenith of her womanhood, in the full glare of her influence, the pattern of good mothers and wives, what an array of grief-stricken ones had there been at her funeral! What solemn tones would have been in the tolling bell! Who of Crampton's best men would not have gladly officiated as her pall-bearers! -- What newspaper would not have been more than willing to give her an extended obituary! And what a rude shock would have gone over the hearts of all in the parish had not prayers been asked and said in her memory!

So it makes a difference how we die!

Men should not allow themselves to say or even think it dies not.

Reader, if you die from one of New England's poor-houses -- though now you may be Judge, Squire, Captain -- Mrs. this one or Mrs. that -- if you die a pauper, you will never get your case into any pulpit in the land; nor will any respectable newspaper give you an obituary notice, unless it be as a statistical fact, probably a cutting one, sarcastic, facetious or solemn, for the benefit of SUMMARY, -- a long, wide awake, factotum sort of an individual the newspapers are mighty thick with!

Mrs. Dodge happened to die just as she did, and when she did -- in a remarkable manner even for a pauper; but prayers were not asked or said for her in church; no one went to her grave but officials, and nobody considered the world a loser by her departure. -- The papers announced the singular manner of her death, and Summary took it up in several quarters, and Scrap-Book pasted the announcement on a blank brown-paper page for future reference; but that was the end of it -- that was all. No marble ever graced the head of her grave; no exotic plant, rose or shrub we planted on its sods. Wild nature, alone, grassed her sleeping place, and the sexton was the only man of a thousand who could point you to it.

"It makes a difference -- guess it does indeed," said Old Mortality, "death is the same, but we are not!"

CHAPTER XXIX.
MRS> ARMSTRONG'S great apprehension. Poverty is very ugly to look straight at!

"It's a dreadful place! ob-h-h!" sighed and groaned Mrs. Armstrong, whose husband was a merchant, when she heard these things. "And it is a possible fate to many a one of us. Oh, how could I survive it -- how live in that awful, wretched manner for an hour! And yet there is aunt Prescott who holds out, and they say is comparatively cheerful. But what neglect, what cruelty, what uncleanliness, what language, what absence of the fear of God and of man. I could not live there, and yet my husband says 'we may come to it.' I know I should never endure it. I would rather die to-night! How careful ought every body to be in his expenses who is exposed to such a fate as this!" Mrs. Armstrong declined going to a sleigh ride that day, the last of the sleighing, with her husband, "for," said she, "it would be an awful thing to want the very necessaries of life in the poor-house in consequence of extravagance now."

"Pshaw, Lucy, who's been scaring you to-day, pray?"

"Oh! I am scared to death every day, when I see what danger there is of poverty. Don't you know, Mr. Armstrong, you are in debt? That you have notes coming due every day, and that you are harassed and dream ugly dreams? Now be warned by me, and don't run headlong into expenses. Let us save money while we have a little, for the tender mercies of the town are cruelty."

"Well, Lucy, if you ain't about crazy on this point, I'll give up. I tell you I am worth ten thousand dollars to-day, and there is just no danger of the poor-house at all."

"You needn't argue in that way, Frederic. I know that ten thousand dollars is a dreadful little sum of money in these days! The interest of it is but six hundred dollars a year, and if we had nothing but that we should soon come to poverty, and beggary itself. Oh-h-h!"

"Lucy, now pray get rid of this whim."

"I tell you, Fred, it ain't a 'whim,' it's living truth."

"What's set you agoing so intolerably fast to-day?" he asked.

"Oh, nothing new -- only -- yes. There is old aunt Joanna Dodge who used to be the belle of Crampton, I have heard my grandmother speak of her as the handsomest creature she ever set eyes on, and she was a familiar friend of my mother twenty years ago, she has been buried all winter in the snow, just because she had become a pauper, and nobody cared enough about her to seek for her."