ailing good-will, of the resource in strange emergency, of the
mutual help and common courage with which all the men worked that day
on that well-nigh hopeless task of breaking open the highway from the
Corners to the station? Well-nigh hopeless, indeed; for although at
first, with fresh cattle and united effort, they made in the hours,
which passed so quickly up to ten o'clock, near two miles headway, and
had brought yesterday's milk thus far,--more than half way to their
point of delivery,--at ten o'clock it was quite evident that this sharp
northwest wind, which told so heavily on the oxen and even on the men,
was filling in the very roadway they had opened, and so was cutting them
off from their base, and, by its new drifts, was leaving the roadway for
to-day's milk even worse than it was when they began. In one of those
extemporized councils, then,--such as fought the battle of Bunker Hill,
and threw the tea into Boston harbor,--it was determined, at ten
o'clock, to divide the working parties. The larger body should work back
to the Four Corners, and by proper relays keep that trunk line of road
open, if they could; while six yoke, with their owners, still pressing
forward to the station, should make a new base at Lovejoy's, where, when
these oxen gave out, they could be put up at his barn. It was quite
clear, indeed, to the experts that that time was not far distant.

And so, indeed, it proved. By three in the afternoon, John and Reuben
and the other leaders of the advance party--namely, the whole of it, for
such is the custom of New England--gathered around the fire at
Lovejoy's, conscious that after twelve hours of such battle as Pavia
never saw, nor Roncesvalles, they were defeated at every point but one.
Before them the mile of road which they had made in the steady work of
hours was drifted in again as smooth as the surrounding pastures, only
if possible a little more treacherous for the labor which they had
thrown away upon it. The oxen which had worked kindly and patiently,
well handled by good-tempered men, yet all confused and half dead with
exposure, could do no more. Well, indeed, if those that had been stalled
fast, and had had to stand in that biting wind after gigantic effort,
escaped with their lives from such exposure. All that the men had gained
was that they had advanced their first depot of milk--two hundred and
thirty-nine cans--as far as Lovejoy's. What supply might have worked
down to the Four