The old woman leered up at him undauntedly; her head bobbed. There was a curious grotesqueness about her blanketed and hooded figure when in motion. There was so little of the old woman herself visible that motion surprised, as it would have done in a puppet. “Told I not Goody Sheldon last night she would never stir porridge again?” said she. “Who stirred the porridge this morning? I trow Goody Sheldon’s hands be too stiff and too cold, though they have stirred well in their day. Hath she dipped her candles yet? Hath she begun on her weaving? I trow ’twill be a long day ere Mary Sheldon’s linen-chest be filled, if she herself go a-gadding to Canada and her mother sleep so late.” “Eat this hot porridge and stop your croaking,” said Goodwife Spear, stooping over her. The old woman extended her two shaking hands for the dish. “That was what she said last night,” she returned. “The living echo the dead, and that is enough wisdom for a witch.” “You’ll be burned for a witch yet, Goody Crane, an you be not careful,” cried Eunice Bishop. “There is fire enough outside to burn all the witches in the land,” muttered the old woman, sipping her porridge. Suddenly she eyed Silence sitting motionless opposite. “Where be your sweetheart this fine morning, Silence Hoit?” she inquired. Silence looked at her. There was a strange likeness between the glitter in her blue eyes and that in Goody Crane’s black ones. The old woman’s great hood nodded over the porridge-dish. “I can tell ye, Mistress Silence,” she said, thickly, as she ate. “He is gone to Canada on a moose-hunt, and unless I be far wrong, he hath taken thy wits with him.” “How know you David Walcott is gone to Canada?” cried Eunice Bishop; and Silence stared at her with her hard blue eyes. Silence’s soft fair hair hung all matted like uncombed flax over her pale cheeks. There was a rigid, dead look about her girlish forehead and her sweet mouth. “I know,” returned Goody Crane, nodding her head. The women washed the pewter dishes, set them back on the dresser, and swept the floor. Little Comfort Arms had been carried up-stairs and laid in the bed whence poor Mary Sheldon had been dragged and haled to Canada. The men stood talking near their stacked muskets. One of the shutters had been opened and the candles put out. The winter sun shone in the window as it had shone before, but the poor folk in Ensign Sheldon’s keeping-room saw it with a certain shock, as if it were a stranger. That morning their own hearts had in them such strangeness that they transferred it like motion to all familiar objects. The very iron dogs in the Sheldon fireplace seemed on the leap with tragedy, and the porridge-kettle swung darkly out of some former age.