ankly and faithfully, and made a
picture which, he said to himself, no one would believe in, with that
warm color tender upon the frozen hills. The soft suffusion of the winter
scene was improbable to him when he had it in, nature before his eyes;
when he looked at it as he got it on his canvas it was simply impossible.

In the forenoons he had nothing to do, for he worked at his picture only
when the conditions renewed themselves with the sinking sun. He tried to
be in the open air, and get the good of it; but his strength for walking
had failed him, and he kept mostly to the paths broken around the house.
He went a good deal to the barn with Whitwell and Jombateeste to look
after the cattle and the horses, whose subdued stamping and champing gave
him a sort of animal pleasure. The blended odors of the hay-mows and of
the creatures' breaths came to him with the faint warmth which their
bodies diffused through the cold obscurity.

When the wide doors were rolled back, and the full day was let in, he
liked the appeal of their startled eyes, and the calls they made to one
another from their stalls, while the men spoke back to them in terms
which they seemed to have in common with them, and with the poultry that
flew down from the barn lofts to the barn floor and out into the
brilliant day, with loud clamor and affected alarm.

In these simple experiences he could not imagine the summer life of the
place. It was nowhere more extinct than in the hollow verandas, where the
rocking-chairs swung in July and August, and where Westover's steps in
his long tramps up and down woke no echo of the absent feet. In-doors he
kept to the few stove-heated rooms where he dwelt with the family, and
sent only now and then a vague conjecture into the hotel built round the
old farm-house. He meant, before he left, to ask Mrs. Durgin to let him
go through the hotel, but he put it off from day to day, with a physical
shrinking from its cold and solitude.

The days went by in the swiftness of monotony. His excursions to the
barn, his walks on the verandas, his work on his picture, filled up the
few hours of the light, and when the dark came he contentedly joined the
little group in Mrs. Durgin's parlor. He had brought two or three books
with him, and sometimes he read from one of them; or he talked with
Whitwell on some of the questions of life and death that engaged his
speculative mind. Jombateeste preferred the kitchen for the naps he took