ept Father
hacking at a pile of wood, while Mother crouched near, trying to keep
warm, with his coat over her feet. Father's back turned into one broad
ache, and his arms stung, but he stuck to it till the farmer growled: "I
guess that'll do. Now don't hang around here."

He handed Father a bundle. Father thought of throwing it at him, but
simultaneously he thought of keeping it and consuming its contents. He
gasped with the insult. He became angrier and angrier as he realized
that the insult applied to Mother also. But before he could think of a
smart, crushing, New-Yorkish reply the farmer grumped away into the
house.

The Applebys dragged themselves back to the highroad. Father was blaming
himself for having brought her to this.... "But I did try to get a job
first," he insisted, and remembered how he had once begged the owner of
a filthy shoe-store on Third Avenue for a place as porter, shoeblack,
anything.

Their road led them by a clump of woods.

"We'll have a fire here and camp!" cried Father.

He had never made a fire in the open, and he understood it to be a most
difficult process. But he was a young lover; his sweetheart was cold; he
defied man and nature. Disdaining any possible passer-by, he plunged
into the woodland. With bare hands he scooped the light fall of snow
from between two rocks, and in the darkness fumbled for twigs and
leaves. Gruntingly he dragged larger boughs, piled the wood with
infinite care, lighted it tremblingly.

They sat on the rocks by the fire and opened the farmer's bundle. There
were cold, gristly roast beef, bread and cheese, and a large,
angry-looking sausage.

"Um!" meditated Father; then, "I'll heat up the roast beef." Which he
grandly did, on little sticks, and they ate it contemplatively, while
their souls and toes relaxed in the warmth, and the black tree-trunks
shone cozily in the glow.

"No cockroaches and no smell of fried fish here, like there is on Avenue
B," said Father. "And we don't have to go home from our picnic. I wonder
why folks let themselves get all old and house-bound, when they could be
like us?"

"Yes," said Mother, drowsily.

He hadn't nerved himself to play the mouth-organ, not all day, but now,
with the luxury of fire and solitude, he played it, and, what's more, he
tried to whistle a natty little ballad which touchingly presented a
castaway as "long-long-longing for his Michigan, his wish-again
ho-o-ome."

Yet Father wasn't altogether s