noon in the middle of August
The rest as they grew up began to cough , as she had heard her husband 's brothers and sisters cough , and then she waited in hapless patience the fulfilment of their doom . The two little girls whose faces the ladies of the first coaching-party saw at the farm-house windows had died away from them ; two of the lank boys had escaped , and in the perpetual exile of California and Colorado had saved themselves alive . Their father talked of going , too , but ten years later he still dragged himself spectrally about the labors of the farm , with the same cough at sixty which made his oldest son at twenty-nine look scarcely younger than himself . One soft noon in the middle of August the farmer came in from the corn-field that an early frost had blighted , and told his wife that they must give it up . He said , in his weak , hoarse voice , with the catarrhal catching in it , that it was no use trying to make a living on the farm any longer . The oats had hardly been worth cutting , and now the corn was gone , and there was not hay enough without it to winter the stock ; if they got through themselves they would have to live on potatoes . Have a vendue , and sell out everything before the snow flew , and let the State take the farm and get what it could for it , and turn over the balance that was left after the taxes ; the interest of the savings-bank mortgage would soon eat that up .