As they talked, Mrs. Field again chilled with the cold gray comfortlessness of it all: to be sick in such a place! The silent appearance of the man out of his grim corner was startling. She was glad when they drove out into the woods again, where the clear sunshine fell and the pines stood against the blazing winter sky motionless as iron trees. Her pleasure in the ride was growing less. To her delicate sense this life was sordid, not picturesque. She wondered how Williams endured it. They arrived at No. 8 just as the men were trailing down the road to work, after eating their dinner. Their gay-colored jackets of Mackinac wool stood out like trumpet notes in the prevailing white and blue and bronze-green. The boss and the sealer came out and met them, and after introductions they went into the shanty to dinner. The cook was a deft young Norwegian--a clean, quick, gentlemanly fellow with a fine brown mustache. He cleared a place for them at one end of the long table, and they sat down. It was a large camp, but much like the others. On the table were the same cheap iron forks, the tin plates, and the small tin basins (for tea) which made up the dinner-set. Basins of brown sugar stood about. "Good gracious! Do people still eat brown sugar? Why, I haven't seen any of that for ages!" cried Mrs. Field. The stew was good and savory, and the bread fair. The tea was not all clover, but it tasted of the tin. Mrs. Field said: "Beef, beef--everywhere beef. One might suppose a menagerie of desert animals ate here. Edward, we must make things more comfortable for our men. They must have cups to drink out of; these basins are horrible." It was humorous to the men, this housewifely suggestion. "Oh, make it napkins, Allie!" "You can laugh, but I sha'n't rest after seeing this. If you thought I was going to say, 'Oh, how picturesque!' you're mistaken. I think it's barbarous." She was getting impatient of their patronizing laughter, as if she were a child. They changed their manner to one of acquiescence, but thought of her as a child just the same. After dinner they all went out to see the crew working. It was the biggest crew anywhere in the neighborhood. Ridgeley got out and hitched the team to a tree, and took Field up to the skidway. Mrs. Field remained in the sleigh. Near her "the swamping team," a span of big, deep-red oxen, came and went among the green tops of the fallen pines. They crawled along their trails in the snow like some strange machinery, and the boy in a blue jacket moved almost as listlessly. Somewhere in the tangle of refuse boughs the swampers' axes click-clocked, saws uttered their grating, rhythmic snarl, and great trees at intervals shivered, groaned, and fell with soft, rushing, cracking sweeps into the deep snow, and the swampers swarmed upon them like Lilliputians attacking a giant enemy.