gay woollen
comforters around their hot necks and jeans jackets full of Spanish
needles: one shouldering a gun, one carrying a game-bag, one eating an
apple: a pack of dogs and no rabbit. The winter brooks, trickling
through banks of frozen grass and broken reeds; their clear brown water
sometimes open, sometimes covered with figured ice.

Red cattle in one distant wood, moving tender-footed around the edge of
a pond. The fall of a forest tree sounding distinct amid the reigning
stillness--felled for cord wood. And in one field--right there before
him!--the chopping sound of busy hemp brakes and the sight of negroes,
one singing a hymn. Oh, the memories, the memories!

By and by he reached the edge of his father's land, climbed to the
topmost rail of the boundary fence and sat there, his eyes glued to the
whole scene. It lay outspread before him, the entirety of that farm. He
had never realized before how little there was of it, how little! He
could see all around it, except where the woods hid the division fence
on one side. And the house, standing in the still air of the winter
afternoon, with its rotting roof and low red chimneys partly obscured
by scraggy cedars--how small it had become! How poor, how wretched
everything--the woodpile, the cabin, the hen-house, the ice-house, the
barn! Was this any part of the great world? It was one picture of
desolation, the creeping paralysis of a house and farm. Did anything
even move?

Something did move. A column of blue smoke moved straight and thin from
the chimney of his father's and mother's room. In a far corner of the
stable lot, pawing and nozzling some remnants of fodder, were the old
horses. By the hay-rick he discovered one of the sheep, the rest being
on the farther side. The cows by and by filed slowly around from behind
the barn and entered the doorless milking stalls. Suddenly his dog
emerged from one of those stalls, trotting cautiously, then with a
playful burst of speed went in a streak across the lot toward the
kitchen. A negro man issued from the cabin, picked out a log, knocked
the ashes out of his pipe in the palm of his hand, and began to cut the
firewood for the night.

All this did not occur at once: he had been sitting there a long
time--heart-sick with the thought of the tragedy he was bringing home.
How could he ever meet them, ever tell them? How would they ever
understand? If he could only say to his father: "I have sinned and I
have broken y