Minnie’s Bishop and Other Stories/”Well Done”

XXIII.—"WELL DONE"HE lay on the bed, a shrunken, feeble figure of a man, with a withered, weather-scarred face, and toil-scarred hands. Over him was a quilt of crazy patchwork, hundreds and hundreds of coloured scraps sewn together, a monument of wonderfully patient toil, made thirty years before by a wife who is dead a long time now. Her works live after her—the quilt which covered him, the girl who stood by the fireplace, at whose birth the mother died, John, the first-born, four other girls, and Thomas, who stokes the engine of a steamer on the St. Lawrence river. Now "himself," husband, father, widower, lay dying. Outside in the kitchen John sat over the fire and waited, a grizzled, unemotional, strong man of forty-five. The clergyman sat by the bedside. Near at hand was a table, standing unsteadily on the pitted earthen floor. It was spread with a white cloth, and on it were little silver vessels. Across the end of it lay the clergyman's surplice. The old man had received the Sacrament for the last time, the Sacrament of which he had partaken a thousand times before, kneeling at the altar rails.
"If it's pleasing to your reverence," he said, "I'd ​like to say over the Belief

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