Morris’s window was open, and himself buried under so many blankets that he did not hear Fessenden enter the room. He sprang up when gripped by the shoulder, however, and after a brief visit to the death-chamber returned and endeavored until morning to answer his pupil’s eager almost incoherent questions. He expounded every belief he had investigated. After Fessenden had concluded that he would prefer to think of his poor old friend in that Nirvana where there was no more work, he went out and spent the day in the woods by himself. This new idea of Death and its impenetrability to mortal light seemed to him magnificent; and Christina, hastily patching together a shroud out of sheets--old sheets at that--and Fritz and Dolf, not even assisted by the hired man--who was sent to chop wood as usual--hammering together a rude coffin, while a few neighbors stamped through the defiles to “help lay the old lady out,” filled his ardent young mind with revolt. The burial-ground was ten miles distant, close by a church, a mountain store, a post-office, and three or four houses--a hamlet in a clearing through which a stage passed twice a week. Once a month the church was visited by an itinerant preacher. Mrs. Nettlebeck, to the satisfaction of her family, had accommodated her setting forth to the Methodist’s returning flight, and, as there was no time to lose, her remains, on the night following her death, were placed on the “jumper”--a low sledge--and driven through the snowdrifts of the forest by torchlight. Fritz drove; Christina stood beside him, arrayed in fragments of hastily contributed black; Fessenden and his faithful chum tramped in the rear; and Dolf and the hired man lighted the way with great pine torches. The jumper was on runners; the men and the boys wore snow-shoes, for the snow was often five or six feet deep; now and then the rude vehicle plunged into a drift and had to be dug out, while the coffin was deposited beyond the reach of the plunging horses. Once the coffin disappeared, and as no one could remember exactly where it had been placed, and the pitch-pine was smoking heavily, it was some time before the treacherous catafalque was discovered. After the box had been dug out and safely hearsed, Fessenden let fly his wrath. “Why on earth can’t you bury the poor old lady in the forest?” he demanded. “You’re treating her horribly, in my opinion; and I’d like to know what better church-yard any one wants than the woods.” “I guess this family’ll git Christian burial every time,” replied Fritz. “But I must say it’s mighty inconvenient dyin’ in the winter. Still, we can spare the time better than if we was sowin’ or harvestin’; there’s something in that. You can’t for to git everything right in this world.”