“If there is a God in Heaven, that horse shall not go back!” cried the woman fiercely; “if you take him from here again it shall be over my dead body! Ay, you may well look feared; for thirty years I have frozen my heart, even to my own son, and now the end's come. It needed that faithful brute to teach me; it needed that one poor creature that loved me and this place, to open the flood-gates. Let me pass, and I warn you to keep away from me. Women go mad in this lonely, starved life. Ay, you are a man, but I am stronger now than you ever were. I've been taught all my life to mind men, to be driven by them, and to-night is a rising of the weak. Put me in the asylum, as other wives are, but tonight my boy's horse shall be treated as never before.” “But M'ri,” he said, trembling, “there, there now, let me git the lantern, you're white as a sheet! We'll keep him if you say so; why hadn't you told me afore?” She flung him aside, lit the lantern and then ran up to an attic chamber under the eaves. “M'ri, you hain't goin' to kill yourself?” he quavered, waiting at the foot of the stairs. She was back in a moment, her arms full of blankets. “What on airth!” “Let me alone, Silas Lowell, these were my weddin' blankets. I've saved 'em thirty years in the cedar chist for this. They was too good for you and me; they air too poor fur my boy's horse.” “But there's a good hoss blanket in the barn.” “The law don't give you these; it mebbe gives you me, but these is mine.” She flung by him, and he heard the barn door rattle back. He put on his coat and went miserably after her, “M'ri, here's yer shawl, you'll git yer death.” The barn lit by the lantern revealed two astonished oxen, a mild-eyed cow, a line of hens roosting on an old hayrack and Maria rubbing the frozen sides of the white horse. “Put yer shawl on, M'ri, you'll git yer death.” “An' you'd lose my work, eh? Leave me, I say, I'm burning up; I never will be cold till I'm dead. I can die! there is death 'lowed us poor critters, an' coffins to pay fur, and grave lots.” Silas picked up a piece of flannel and began to rub the horse. In ghastly quiet the two worked, the man patching the woman, and looking timorously at the axe in the corner. One woman in the neighborhood, living on a cross-road where no one ever came, had gone mad and jnur-dered her husband, but “M'ri” had always been so clear-headed! Then the woman went and began piling hay in the empty stall. “You ain't goin' to use thet good hay fur beddin,' be ye, M'ri?” asked Silas in pathetic anxiety. “I tell you let me be. Who has a better right to this? His labor cut it and hauled it; this is a time when the laborer shall git his hire.” Silas went on rubbing, listening in painful silence to the click of the lock on the grain bin, and the swish of oats being poured into a trough. “Don't give him too much, M'ri,” he pleaded humbly, “I don't mean ter be savin', but he'll eat hisself to death.”