[Illustration: 0336] THE BREAKING OF WINTER, By Patience Stapleton |That's the fust funerel I've went to sence I was a gal, but that I drove to the graveyard.” “I dunno as that done the corp enny good.” “An' seems all to onc't I miss old Tige,” muttered the first speaker half to herself. It was snowing now, a fine mist sifting down on deep-drifted stone-walls and hard, shining roads, and the tinkle of sleigh-bells, as a far-away black line wound over the hill to the bleak graveyard, sounded musical and sweet in the muffled air. Two black figures in the dazzling white landscape left the traveled road and ploughed heavily along a lane leading to a grove of maples, cold and naked in the winter scene. “They say Ann Kirk left a good prop'ty,” said the first speaker, a woman of fifty, with sharp black eyes, red cheeks, few wrinkles and fewer gray hairs in the black waves under her pumpkin hood. She pulled her worn fur cape around her neck and took a new grasp on her shawl, pinning it tight. “Ann an' me used to take a sight of comfort driving old Tige.” The man, her companion, grunted and went sturdily ahead. He was enveloped in a big overcoat, a scarf wound around his neck and a moth-eaten fur cap pulled down over his ears. His blue eyes were watery from the cold, his nose and chin peaked and purple, and frost clung to the short gray beard about his mouth. “Who'll git the prop'ty?” panted the woman. She held her gown up in front, disclosing a pair of blue socks drawn over her shoes. “Relashuns, I s'pose.” “She was alius so savin', keepin' drip-pins for fryin', and sfellin' nearly every mite of butter they made; an' I've heered the Boston relashuns was extravagant. Her sister hed on a black silk to the funerel to ride to the grave in; I guess they are well-to-do.” “Dunno,” gruffly. Somehow then the woman remembered that glossy silk, and that she had never had one. Then this sister's husband, how attentive he was leading his wife out to the sleigh, and she had seen them walking arm-in-arm the past summer, when no man in Corinth ever offered his arm to his wife unless it were to a funeral and they were first mourners. “Silas never give me his arm but the fust Sunday we were merried,” she thought; “bein' kind to wimmen wan't never the Loweirs way.” A sharp pain in her side made her catch her breath and stop a moment, but the man paid no heed to her distress. At the end of a meadow on a little rise looking down a long, shady lane, stood a gray old farm-house, to which age had given picturesqueness and beauty, and here Maria Lowell had lived the thirty years of her married life. She unlocked the door and went into the cold kitchen where the fire had died down. A lean cat came purring from under the table, and the old clock seemed to tick more cheerily now the mistress had returned.