his family.'

We had listened attentively. It was impossible not to admire his frank,
manly faith.

'I am always glad to meet a young man who thinks seriously about these
things,' said grandfather, 'and I would never be the one to say you were
not in God's care when you were among the soldiers.' After dinner it was
decided that young Jelinek should hook our two strong black farm-horses
to the scraper and break a road through to the Shimerdas', so that
a wagon could go when it was necessary. Fuchs, who was the only
cabinetmaker in the neighbourhood was set to work on a coffin.

Jelinek put on his long wolfskin coat, and when we admired it, he told
us that he had shot and skinned the coyotes, and the young man who
'batched' with him, Jan Bouska, who had been a fur-worker in Vienna,
made the coat. From the windmill I watched Jelinek come out of the barn
with the blacks, and work his way up the hillside toward the cornfield.
Sometimes he was completely hidden by the clouds of snow that rose about
him; then he and the horses would emerge black and shining.

Our heavy carpenter's bench had to be brought from the barn and carried
down into the kitchen. Fuchs selected boards from a pile of planks
grandfather had hauled out from town in the fall to make a new floor for
the oats-bin. When at last the lumber and tools were assembled, and the
doors were closed again and the cold draughts shut out, grandfather rode
away to meet the coroner at the Shimerdas', and Fuchs took off his coat
and settled down to work. I sat on his worktable and watched him. He did
not touch his tools at first, but figured for a long while on a piece of
paper, and measured the planks and made marks on them. While he was
thus engaged, he whistled softly to himself, or teasingly pulled at his
half-ear. Grandmother moved about quietly, so as not to disturb him. At
last he folded his ruler and turned a cheerful face to us.

'The hardest part of my job's done,' he announced. 'It's the head end
of it that comes hard with me, especially when I'm out of practice. The
last time I made one of these, Mrs. Burden,' he continued, as he sorted
and tried his chisels, 'was for a fellow in the Black Tiger Mine, up
above Silverton, Colorado. The mouth of that mine goes right into the
face of the cliff, and they used to put us in a bucket and run us over
on a trolley and shoot us into the shaft. The bucket travelled across a
box canon three hundred feet deep, and about a