he has made his last effort and can do no more. He
opened the door of his study and listened. There was no sound. The
children had all gone to bed. He turned back to the old table to work
until midnight on his sermon for the morrow. The text was: "_As for me
and my house, we will serve the Lord._"

II

But that sermon was not to be delivered. Mr. North woke very early,
before it was light, and could not find sleep again. In the gray of
the morning, when the little day was creeping among the houses of
Glendour, he heard steps in the street and then a whisper of voices at
his gate. He threw his wrapper around him and went down quietly to
open the door.

A group of men were there, with trouble in their faces. They told him
of an accident on the river. A sleigh crossing the ice during the
night had lost the track. The horses had broken into an air-hole and
dragged the sleigh with them. The man went under the ice with the
current, and came out a little while ago in the big spring-hole by the
point. They had pulled the body ashore. They did not know for sure who
it was--a stranger--but they thought--perhaps----

The minister listened silently, shivering once or twice, and passing
his hand over his brow as if to brush away something. When their
voices paused and ceased, he said slowly, "Thank you for coming to me.
I must go with you, and then I can tell." As he went upstairs softly
and put on his clothes, he repeated these words to himself two or
three times mechanically--"yes, then I can tell." But as he went with
the men he said nothing, walking like one in a dream.

On the bank of the river, amid the broken ice and trampled yellow
snow, the men had put a couple of planks together and laid the body of
the stranger upon them turning up the broad collar of his fur coat to
hide his face. One of the men now turned the collar down, and
Nathaniel North looked into the wide-open eyes of the dead.

A horrible tremor shook him from head to foot. He lifted his hands, as
if he must cry aloud in anguish. Then suddenly his face and figure
seemed to congeal and stiffen with some awful inward coldness--the
frost of the last circle of the Inferno--it spread upon him till he
stood like a soul imprisoned in ice.

"Yes," he said, "this is my brother Abel. Will you carry him to my
house? We must bury him."

During the confusion and distress of the following days that frozen
rigidity never broke nor melted. Mr. North gave no directio