I am thinking of my younger brother after he had grown a little older--I am thinking of him grown into a man and become habitually silent like mother--I am thinking of him as he was just before he mysteriously disappeared out of our lives and never came back. Now, however, he is in bed with the other brother and myself. An older brother, he who crept through the cornfields to paint the name of Alf Granger on the fence, had already gone from our lives. He had a talent for drawing, and a drunken half-insane cutter of stones for graveyards has taken him away from our town to another town where he is already sitting at a desk drawing designs for gravestones. A dove descends out of the sky and holds a leaf in its bill. There is an angel clinging to a rock in the midst of a storm at sea. Rock of ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee. The three boys are in the bed in the room and there are not enough bedclothes. Father’s overcoat, now too old to be worn, is thrown over the foot of the bed and the three boys have been permitted to undress downstairs, in the kitchen of the house, by the kitchen stove. The oldest of the boys remaining at home (that is myself) must undress first and must arrange his clothes neatly on a kitchen chair. Mother does not scold about such a trifling matter. She stands silently looking and the boy does as he has been told. There is something of my grandmother in a certain look that can come into her eyes. “Well, you’d better,” it says. How unsuccessfully I have tried all my life to cultivate just that look, for myself! And now the boy has undressed and must run in his white flannel nightgown barefooted through the cold house, past frosted windows, up a flight of stairs and, with a flying leap into the bed. The flannel nightgown has been worn almost threadbare by the older brother--now gone out into the world--before it has come down to him who wears it now. He is the oldest of the brothers at home and must take the first plunge into the icy bed, but soon the others come running. They are lying like little puppies in the bed but as they grow warmer the two older boys begin to fight. There is a contest. The point is not to be compelled to lie on the outside where the covers may come off in the night. Blows are struck and tense young bodies are intertwined. “It’s your turn to-night! No it’s yours! You’re a liar! Take that! Well then, take that! I’ll show you!” The youngest brother of the three brothers has already taken one of the two outside positions. It is his fate. He is not strong enough to fight with either of the other two and perhaps he does not care for fighting. He lies silently in the cold in the darkness while the fight between the other two goes on and on. They are of almost equal strength and the fight might possibly last for an hour.