n' to make myself at all comfortable
this evenin' with that noise eternally pesterin' me? Seems like it has
always been my experience a man has got to give in first _an'_ last."

Then wrapped in the faded splendour of a once gorgeous silk
dressing-gown the old man disappeared into his bedroom, returning with a
shawl crossed over his shoulders and a knitted muffler tied about his
head. On opening his door he listened again for a moment, but, as the
crying had not ceased, waded across his yard through the snow in his
carpet slippers until he knocked with his big blue-veined old hand hard
against the locked back door of a cottage adjoining his.

At first there was no answer except a continuing of the sniffling,
snuffling noises which only made the visitor rap more vehemently, when
at length the door opened and there stood a woman holding a lantern
above her head.

"Uncle Ambrose Thompson, what kin you want o' me this time o' night?"
she asked; "it's goin' on nine o'clock! You ain't sick?"

Uncle Ambrose shook his head, surveying his neighbour sympathetically,
but oh, so disparagingly! She was so plainly an old-time old maid, flat
in the chest and angular, a hard and bony structure, with a face that
was equally barren save that its desert waste had lately been swept by a
storm.

"No, I ain't sick, child," Uncle Ambrose answered, "but you
are--heartsick. And what's more it seems likely I can't stand that noise
you keep on a-makin'. You come over and set by my kitchen fire a space
and kind er talk things out with me. I reckon I ain't altogether lost
my soothin' powers!"

Before his glowing fire the old host comfortably placed two rocking
chairs side by side. For the past seven years Ambrose Thompson had been
a widower for the third time and, since Peachy's death, having come back
home from the Red Farm, had lived all alone in his once rose-coloured
cottage, looked after only by his neighbours.

Picking up a crazy quilt cushion from his chair, the old man surveyed it
tenderly. "This was my Em'ly's make," he explained; "seems, 'Lizabeth
Horton, that you and me 're most like strangers, havin' lived side by
side only a little piece like seven years. Em'ly she was the second of
my three wives." And then thoughtfully passing his hand backward over
his high bald crown, Uncle Ambrose smiled in a kind of slow and puzzled
fashion.

"No, now I've done mixed things up a bit; I'm gittin' a little oncertain
these days. Em'ly wasn