CHAPTER XXXI.

THE END.

Never have I been overly superstitious yet I do believe one has premonitions and that omens foretell coming events. Certain things to which a superstition is attached have daily occurred in my life so that I no longer look upon them as a superstitious belief but as actual happenings. For instance, the number 13 has so many horrors for me that I look forward with dread to next year because my child will be 13 and the year 1913. Not once but several times I have been present at parties where 13 sat down to the table and not once but several times a dear friend has soon after the event died. That June when I had left my Sandusky home to attend a cousin's wedding in Ashtabula I left on Friday, the 13th, and my ticket was No. 13.

So when on the 13th of April, 1910, Boyd and I drove into Everett, I had some misgivings that something was about to befall us. Something, some unseen power, was trying to help us but I would not listen and did the opposite thing from what the small voice was whispering in my ear to do and so we were not saved. It was like when one is playing bridge. That first innate instinct tells us to be careful and make it diamonds

which we are sure of, but our wilder nature prevails and we risk it "no trumps" and lose.

If it had been any other day than the 13th of April everything might have gone differently. Fate was trying to help us. Ordinarily we would, on entering Everett, have driven right by the Mitchell hotel. Mr. Peake and Mrs. Sterling were registered there that day but their names in the paper told me nothing for they were not Mr. Peake and Mrs. Sterling but assumed names. Ordinarily we would have gone right up to the livery-stable we always went to, driving by the sheriff's office and stopping diagonally across from the stately Snohomish county court-house. But to-day for some reason we drove up a side street and left Buck standing in the alley back of our good friend's stable and fed Buck there. Our friends urged us to stay all night, Boyd urged me to accept their invitation, but they had sickness in their family and I feared we would be intruding. Such small matters turn the current of one's whole existence. Trivial incidents rule one's destiny. Why we do this or that is a matter for philosophers to decipher. We have "freedom of the will," we do as we like. Ah! but what decides our liking this way better than the other. Fate is hiding there somewhere. It is hiding right beyond our wills and it chooses what course we shall take. John Burroughs says:

"Our choice is along the lines of forces or inborn tendencies of which we are unconscious. We are free

to do as our inherited traits, our temperament, our environment, our training, the influence of the climate over us and the geography and the geology."

Oh, but how frightfully hampered we are sometimes by our inherited traits, our temperament, our environment, our training, our geography and climate.

We try to do one thing but something leads us to do another. So our acts seem like disobedient scholars, they act apart from our will. We are almost led to believe as John Burroughs does. He says:

"Indeed our lives are evidently the result of such a play and interplay of forces from far and from near, from the past and from the present, from the earth and from the heavens, forces so subtle and constant and so beyond the reach of our analysis that one is half converted to the claim of astrology and inclined to believe that the fate of each of us was written in the heavens before the foundations of the world."

So ask me not why I did not stay with kind friends in Everett that 13th day of April, 1910. Fate led us home to Lake Stevens but even then our unseen friend tried to help us. The draw-bridge was open and we had to wait a long time while boats went through and Boyd said: "Let's go back and stay all night, mother." Oh, that I had. For then at least he would have been spared the shame of being taken from his school.

Farther on a tree had fallen over the road and we had to wait while boughs were chopped so we could get across.

It was late when we reached home and we retired soon after an evening meal. I remember while I was getting supper Boyd practiced a little piece he was learning for some school exercises to be given at the close of school. Each child was to be a different character from favorite child stories and Boyd's piece began: "Jack the giant killer am I."

The morning of the 14th dawned. We had to rise early as the school bus came by at 7:30. Boyd begged me to let him stay at home but as he had stayed out the day before I thought he ought to go to-day. I packed his little lunch pail, never knowing that it was the last lunch I should ever put up for him. I remember exactly what was in it. Several sandwiches of bread and delicious lamb between. Some little cakes, some oranges and a little package of peppermint candy.

As he turned on the hill to kiss me good-bye, Boyd said: "Mother, I don't want to go to school to-day." But I said, "Yes, you had better go to-day, school will soon be out, you know."

And so I watched him run down the hill and out of sight. Yes, out of sight, followed by his faithful duet of dogs, black Bob and white, fluffy Tige.

I heard the children's voices in the bus as they gladly welcomed Boyd.

At 4 o'clock that afternoon that school bus came by and all was quiet but many children's eyes are wet as they tearfully say: "Boyd is not here to-night." No, Boyd McIntyre is gone and Curtis Brewer sits in the