dogs at
their backs. It was dusk there, too, for the western gable window,
broken the evening before by the force of the storm, was nailed tight
from within and piled high from without; while the window in the
opposite end of the house was intact, but veiled with frost and hung
with icicles. The week's washing, swinging under the peaked roof on a
long, sagging clothes-line, added further to the gloom. Stiff and
specter-like, it moved gently in the currents of air that blew down from
the bare, slanting rafters, each garment taking on a fantastic shape of
its own. Near the pipe hung the stockings of the family, limp and
steaming in the twilight.

The biggest brother had been reading aloud to the other two; but, as the
light grew less, he threw the paper-bound book aside, and they began to
talk in subdued tones. Below them, they could hear the neighbor woman
walking back and forth, and the popping of the kernels in the stove;
behind them, the dogs slept; and from above came faint sounds of the
storm.

Outside, night was coming on fast--the early night of a stormy day. The
neighbor woman, noting the increasing darkness in the sitting-room,
lighted a tall kerosene lamp and set it on the clock-shelf near a south
window. The lower windows to the west were closed and sightless, so no
beacon could shine from them; but she hoped that the lamp's feeble rays,
piercing the unscreened top panes of the south window, might by chance
catch the eye of the husband were he striving to return.

With increasing darkness, the blizzard grew in strength and fury. It
loosened a clapboard below the east gable, and shrieked through the
partial opening. It rattled the window, and tore at the heavy planks on
the roof that supported the stovepipe. It blew the snow from the cracks
and whistled through them shrilly. It caught the house in its drifts and
shook it.

The dogs, awakened by the screeching and clash of things, crouched in
fright against their masters. Shepherd, pointer, and Indian dogs
trembled when the wind moaned, and answered every whine from without
with another. The St. Bernard, separating himself from the pack, sprang
at a bound to the boarded-up window and, raising his head, uttered long,
dismal howls. The big brothers hastened to quiet him, and spared neither
foot nor fist; but the dog, eluding them, returned again and again to
the window, and mourned with his muzzle to the west.

It was while the hurricane was thus raging ove